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EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 



EUROPE IN 
CONVALESCENCE 



By 

ALFRED E. ZIMMERN 

Author of "The Greek Commonwealth," 
'•Nationality and Government," etc. 



MILLS & BOON, LIMITED, 

49 RUPERT STREET, 

LONDON, W.l. 



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Published 1922. 



©Cf.Airit4 424 <^i^ 



Printed in Great Britain by 
Southampton Times Ltd., Southampton 



"3>46lcole6 
TO ALL THOSE 

IN EVERY COUNTRY OF EUROPE 

WHO HAVE THE COURAGE 

TO LOOK FORWARD. 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

PREFACE ........ 13 

PART I 
THE UPHEAVAL 

INTRODUCTORY . . , . . .19 

I. THE POLITICAL UPHEAVAL . . . . .20 

II. THE ECONOMIC UPHEAVAL . . . . .26 

III. THE UPHEAVAL OF IDEAS . . . . -36 

A. Political Doctrines 

CONSERVATISM ....... 37 

LIBERALISM . . . . . . -38 

SOCIALISM ....... 42 

B. Institutions 

THE PRESS . . . . ... -52 

THE UNIVERSITIES . . . . . -57 

THE CHURCHES. . . . . . .63 

PART II 
THE SETTLEMENT 

INTRODUCTORY . . . . . -71 

I. AUGUST, I914-SEPTEMBER, I918 . . .72 

II. SEPTEMBER 29, I918-NOVEMBER II, I918 . . 78 

III. NOVEMBER II, I918, TO THE OPENING OF THE 

CONFERENCE . . . . . .96 

IV. THE PEACE CONFERENCE ..... I09 

PART III 
THE OUTLOOK 

I. THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK ..... 123 
II. THE ECONOMIC OUTLOOK ..... I77 

ZI 



12 CONTENTS 

APPENDICES 

I. ALLIED NOTE ...... 195 

II. EXTRACT FROM ALLIED REPLY .... IQ^ 

III. EXTRACT FROM SPEECH BY MR. J. M. KEYNES . I96 

IV. EXTRACT FROM ARTICLE BY MR. LAMONT . . I98 
V. MEMORANDUM BY GENERAL SMUTS . . . 199 

VI. EXTRACT FROM STATEMENT BY MR. HOOVER . 203 

VII. EXTRACT FROM PAPER BY MR. A. E. ZIMMERN . 204 



PREFACE 

In letting this volume go forth the scholar in me is 
making a concession to the citizen. It is not the 
book I planned to write ; or rather, to be more precise, 
it is not the whole book. But the prospect that 
the country will be called before long to pass judg- 
ment on the policies of the present administration 
makes me feel that I ought not to withhold such 
contribution as I can offer, out of a somewhat 
unusual experience, towards the discussion of 
European issues. 

My last volume on this subject, a collection of 
war-time essays, was published in the summer of 
1918. At that time I believed, in common with the 
great bulk of my fellow-countrymen, that the 
British Commonwealth was the political embodiment 
of the most powerful idealistic association ; the most 
powerful influence for justice, honour, and public 
right in the world at the present time ; and I gave 
free and reasoned expression in my writings to ideals 
for which so many of my own and a younger genera- 
tion, whose influence in our public affairs we miss 
more and more as the barren days go on, have given 
their lives. I have never stooped to propaganda 
or partisanship ; nor is there a word in my previous 
volume regarding the fundamental idealism of the 
British peoples, or the potentiahties of the British 
Commonwealth, which I would wish to retract. 

But if the British peoples stand where they did, 
the same cannot be said of their embodied authority, 

13 



14 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

of the Government which still now, in 1922 as in 
1918, represents them — the peoples of the Dominions 
and of India as well as of Great Britain — before the 
world. Since December, 1918, when we elected a 
Parhament pledged to violate a solemn agreement 
made but five weeks earlier, we stand shamed, dis- 
honoured, and, above all, distrusted before man- 
kind ; and not until we have publicly acknowledged, 
and made what amends we yet can for the wrong 
then done, can the lips of true lovers of Britain be 
unsealed again. 

Readers of this volume, and of the appendices 
attached to it, can judge the issue for themselves. 
I leave it to them to decide how far the General 
Election of 1918 was a turning point in European 
history, and whether the odious wrangling over the 
reparation justly owing to the civiHan populations 
of the invaded districts, which has confused and 
disgraced the public life of Europe during the last 
three years, is not due chiefly to the selfishness and 
cowardice of British politicians. Others, upon 
whom a forgetful public has become accustomed 
to unload the blame, may share that responsibiUty, 
although in lesser degree ; but they had not the 
same solemn oft-repeated statements of policy, the 
same declarations of altruistic intention, to live up 
to. The magnitude of our lapse, and of our subse- 
quent hypocrisy, must be judged by the magnitude 
of our professions. 

I have faith enough in my countr3mien to believe 
that when once they truly understand the nature 
of the injustice, and the neglect of duty, of which 
we have been guilty towards the European peoples 
as a whole and especially towards France and 



PREFACE 15 

Germany — an injustice which powerful influences 
in the Press and elsewhere have been set in motion 
to prevent them from realizing — they will not 
hesitate to take the action which the situation 
demands. It is time that Britain was once more 
governed by men whose word is their bond. 

I write this preface in the United States, not a 
hundred miles from Washington. When, at the 
National Cemetery at Arlington, I saw the represen- 
tatives of my country, following the Commander- 
in-Chief of the Allied armies, pay their tribute to 
the Unknown Soldier, I cherished the hope, which 
was hardly an expectation, that Britain might take 
up at Washington the task she declined at Paris — 
that of being the skilled interpreter for Europe to 
the Enghsh-speaking world overseas. She has not 
played that part, or even essayed to play it, but has 
preferred, in a Conference called primarily to con- 
sider extra-European issues, to emphasize her extra- 
European interests and affiliations. I do not 
criticize this policy, for I appreciate the difficulties, 
internal as well as external, which led to its adoption, 
I only place it on record, since our European neigh- 
bours and ex-allies realize it more fully than our- 
selves. When we rejoice, as rejoice we can, over 
" English-speaking union," let us so frame our 
policy and behaviour as to rule out the odious 
imputation of " Anglo-Saxon domination." Britain, 
by her history and situation, is both a European 
and an extra-European power ; she symboHzes that 
world-interdependence which Europeans of the last 
generation and Americans of this have been too apt 
to ignore. If she has helped at Washington to bring 
Asia closer to America, she may still, under wiser 



i6 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

and more trusted leadership, return to the role 
which Europe, even now. expects from her — tluit 
of the good European. And for the good European 
Europe is more than a market or a field for invest- 
ment and consortiums. In caring for the body of 
Europe, as we must, let us not forget her soul, nor, 
in running after rapid expediencies, ignore the 
influence upon lier of our own. Brit;iin's fust duty 
to Europe to-day is to return to her best self. 

During part of the period covered by events 
described in this volume, I held an otllcial position. 
Whilst I cannot divest myself of knowledge and 
judgments thus acquired nor alter the furniture 
of my mind, I have been scrupulous, perhaps over- 
scrupulous, in making use of no facts derived from 
officiid knowledge which have not found their way 
elsewhere into print. 

A. E. Z. 
Baltimore, January 8, 1922. 



PART I 
THE UPHEAVAL 



Things are in the saddle and ride 
mankind. 



Be 



INTRODUCTORY 

OviiK tJireo years have passed since the last guns 
wf;re fired in the Great War, Four of the five Peace 
Treaties which were to be negotiated have been 
signed and ratified, and are in process of execution, 
whilst the fifth — tliat wit?i Turkey — is now but 
little concerned with European territories. The 
psychological consequences of war-strain, the hot 
fit of nationalism followed by a cold fit of parochial- 
ism and indifference, are slowly but surely passing 
away, and the economic reaction, the sudden boom 
followed as suddenly by a precipitous depression in 
1919, has entered into a chronic stage. With the 
disappearance of these ephemeral phenomena, the 
permanent changes wrought during the last seven 
years in the life of the Continent are becoming 
more manifest. It is, therefore, perhaps at last 
possible to look back in perspective at the convulsion, 
the greatest and most sudden in her long history, 
through which Europe has passed, and to make a 
brief survey of her present situation and outlook. 

It will be simplest and clearest to begin our survey 
from the negative end, by pointing to the forces and 
influences which no longer, since the events of the 
last years, fill their pre-war place in the life of 
Europe. When we have seen what the war has 
destroyed or transformed we shall h(s better able 
to estimate what is likely to take their place. War 
is always a great destroyer, and this, the greatest 
of all wars, has been also the greatest of destroyers. 
If the constructive poUcies with which the various 

19 



20 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

belligerents entered the fray have mostly proved 
illusory, or, at the best, premature, their destructive 
aims have in great part been fulfilled. So far, at 
any rate, as the Allies are concerned, what we went 
to war against is irrevocably overthrown, but the 
positive aims inscribed on our banners, and later on 
those of the United States, seem as far from realiza- 
tion as ever. We have won the war negatively but 
not positively, or, to put it in less strictly accurate 
language, we have won the war, but we have, so 
far, lost the peace. 

The war has wrought havoc in Europe in three 
fields — the political, the economic, and what may 
be called the field of ideas. Let us take the three 
in order. 



CHAPTER I 

THE POLITICAL UPHEAVAL 

Ever smce the formation of the big territorial 
monarchies at the end of the Middle Ages the political 
destinies of Europe have been swayed by what 
have been known as the Powers, sometimes 
ranged in opposing groups and maintaining an 
uneasy balance of forces, sometimes acting together 
in a no less uneasy concert. During the half century 
prior to 1914 there were six Great Powers on the 
European stage — Great Britain, Germany, France, 
Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Of these, 
Great Britain had exercised a supremacy at sea 
unchallenged since Trafalgar, but she had on the 
whole held aloof from continental entanglements. 



THE UPHEAVAL 21 

and the bearing of her naval supremacy upon the 
position of the miUtary powers of the Continent in 
the event of war was but httle realized. Both the 
German General Staff and the traders and manu- 
facturers, misled, the former by the tradition of 
Clausewitz, the latter by the resuscitated Cobdcnism 
of Norman Angell and his school, ignored the latent 
possibiUties of a blockade. The soldiers forgot 
that to win fifty battles and " to conquer whole 
kingdoms " (to quote the words of a German general 
who realized the truth too late) is not necessarily 
to win a war ; and the business men failed to realize 
that there are stronger forces, even in the twentieth 
century world, than self-interest, and that a nation 
of shopkeepers would not shrink, at the call of 
conviction, from employing the British Navy for 
the systematic impoverishment of Britain's best 
customers. Few continental statesmen understood 
either the vicissitudes of British policy, oscillating 
in normal times between a " splendid isolation " 
and a spasmodic and rather patronizing interest in 
the welfare of the continental peoples, or the 
tenacious, unspoken patriotism and the sure compre- 
hension of permanent British interests which always 
lay watchful in the background. Thus Britain's 
sudden abandonment of Denmark in the face of 
Prussia in 1864, her failure to insist on the enforce- 
ment by the Turks of the reform clauses of the 
Berlin Treaty of 1878, and her acquiescence in the 
high-handed annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina 
by Austria-Hungary in 1908, counted for more in 
the Chancellories of Europe than either the warning 
voices of British statesmen (such warnings had been 
heard too often before) or the strategic lessons of 



23 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

the American Civil War, or the writings of students 
of modern sea-power. 

Of the five remaining Great Powers, Germany, 
the latest to enter the circle, was beyond all question 
the most powerful. Between 1871 and the fall of 
Bismarck in 1890 she was indisputably the centre 
of the pohtical system of Europe. She dominated 
the Berlin Congress of 1878, she Hnked herself 
shortly afterwards in a firm aUiance with Austria- 
Hungary and Italy, she was still further safeguarded 
against Bismarck's nightmare — a war on two fronts 
— by a secret treaty with Russia, whilst her relations 
with the Britain of Disraeh, Salisbury, and Queen 
Victoria were always carefully maintained on cordial 
terms. German aims and the German outlook 
during the eighties may have been substantially 
the same as they were twenty and thirty years 
later, but the methods were different, and so there 
was no talk of the " inevitable " clash of ideals. 
Two nations, like two neighbours, can well live 
peacefully side by side holding contrary opinions. 
It is not a comfortable situation ; but it is only 
when one of the parties becomes fooHsh, flamboyant, 
or provocative that it becomes impossible. It 
was from 1890 onwards, when the tiller of the 
German ship passed into clumsier and more restless 
hands, that the supremacy of Germany began to 
be challenged for fear of the use she might make of 
it. 

Recent revelations have made it clear that it was 
only after at least two serious rebuffs that Britain, 
who had been ready in 1895 and again later to throw 
her influence on the side of the Triple AUiance, 
gravitated reluctantly but inevitably towards the 



THE UPHEAVAL 23 

opposing Franco-Russian group. Those who still 
believe in the legend of the " encirclement of 
Germany " by a jealous world and in the sleepless 
mahgnity of King Edward towards his insufferable 
nephew, should study the chapter of diplomatic 
history which opens with Lord SaUsbury's visit to 
the Kaiser at Cowes in 1895 to offer Germany a free 
hand in Asiatic Turkey and closes with the Mesopo- 
tamian and African agreements negotiated between 
Sir Edward Grey and Count Lichnowsky in 1914, but 
never ratified by the latter 's government.* 

But if, during the reign of Wilhelm IL, thanks to 
her own shortsightedness and incompetence, and 
her genius for exciting mistrust, her diplomatic 
influence diminished, her trade and industry, her 
navy, her mercantile marine, and with them her 
population increased by leaps and bounds, whilst her 
military system was still regarded (and, as the war 
showed, not without reason) as the most perfect 
instrument of its kind. When, in 1913, Dr. Helf- 
ferich, then head of the Bank of Germany, later 
Finance Minister and Deputy-Chancellor, pubUshed, 
in honour of the Kaiser's Jubilee, his book on the 
material progress of Germany during the previous 
quarter of a century, he was able to show a record of 
almost uninterrupted prosperity, and to claim with 
good reason that German pohcy and resources in 
finance, commerce, and manufactures, as in ship- 
building, were a power, ranged consciously along- 
side of the German army and navy, for the main- 
tenance and extension of German poUtical influence 

*The British Foreign Office archives are still sealed on this subject. 
An account from the German side, by the Swedish writer, Rudolf 
Kjellen, will be found in vol. 45 (1921), p. 117 ff., of Schmoller's 
Jahrbuch, with bibliography. It is sufhciently damning. 



24 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

no longer in Europe only, but throughout the world. 

In other words, Germany in 1914 dominated the 
political system of the Continent, not only as being 
actually the strongest military and the second 
strongest naval power, but also because of her visible 
ambitions and potentialities. Her political in- 
fluence, as was recognized nowhere more clearly than 
in Britain, seemed destined inevitably to increase, 
for her resources, and the use she made of them, were 
only too obviously in harmony with the spirit and 
tendencies which make for power in the twentieth 
century ; all that was open to question was into 
which channels — whether in the Balkans, in Asia 
Minor, in North Africa, in the Far East, or in the 
tropics — her untiring and supremely organized 
energies would be directed, and whether the old 
political system of Europe could stand the strain 
of such rapid and uncomfortable growth by one of 
its members without violent upheaval. 

The war has put an end to German political 
supremacy in Europe and destroyed the military 
and economic foundations on which it was built. 
The sixty or seventy millions of Germans in Central 
Europe will undoubtedly again play an important 
part in the political life of the Continent. For the 
moment, however, they are exhausted and bewil- 
dered, bereft of the leadership and authority to 
which they are accustomed, and weighed down by 
the economic burden imposed upon them by the 
Peace Treaty. The German Republic is not yet 
strong enough, either at home or abroad, to fill a 
commanding place in the political system of Europe. 

If the Germany of Bismarck has disappeared, the 
Austria-Hungary of Metternich and Francis Joseph 



THE UPHEAVAL 25 

has passed even more completely into history. In 
the place of a single Great Power extending from 
the Lake of Constance to the Iron Gates of the 
Danube, and from Trieste to the Carpathians, there 
is a congeries of national states, either newly founded, 
or so much enlarged and transformed as to be faced 
with urgent problems of constitution-making and 
administrative reorganization. What is left under 
the aegis of Vienna is but the mutilated torso of the 
old Habsburg dominions ; and even here the change, 
from monarchy to republic, from empire to national 
state, from self-sufhciency to indigence, is so far- 
reaching that the German-Austrian is quite as 
conscious as any of his neighbours of living in a new 
and uncharted world. 

Even more dramatic have been the collapse of 
Russia and her ehmination, not merely as a Great 
Power, but as a Power at all, from the political 
system of Europe. The mighty empire which used 
to play the protector and pull the strings at Belgrade, 
Sofia, and Cettigne, the mother country of the Slav 
peoples, lies at the mercy of her former proteges, 
among whom, at Prague, Belgrade, and elsewhere, 
many of her best are happy to find a refuge. The 
most that can be hoped for Russia is that Western 
capitalism, whence alone, as it seems, her rehef can 
come, will spare her the fate of a Morocco or 
Mesopotamia, and allow her gifted but ill-starred 
peoples to work out their own destiny in relative 
independence. 

Of the two remaining Great Powers, France has 
borne the greatest burden and heat of the conflict, 
and, in spite or because of a victory due in chief 
measure to her military effort, has not yet fully 



26 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

regained the serenity or the reserve of strength 
which she needs in order to devote herself to the 
tasks which the state of Europe imposes upon her. 
Italy, hitherto untried as a Great Power, has passed 
through a great ordeal and moments of supreme 
peril to her morale and her unity. Abounding with 
life and activity, she has been quickest to resume 
her normal existence, but neither her leaders 
nor her people have yet grown into the new 
and more responsible position opened out to them 
by the elimination of her former associates in the 
Triple Alliance. 

Such are the elements of the former Concert of 
Europe as the war has left it. What is there to 
take its place ? How are the collective problems 
of Europe to be handled in a world so weakened 
and disorganized ? One answer will leap to the 
lips at once — the League of Nations. But the 
discussion of this and other constructive forces 
must be left for a later chapter. 



CHAPTER II 

THE ECONOMIC UPHEAVAL 

The economic history of Europe during the century 
between the close of the Napoleonic wars and the 
British declaration of war against Germany in 1914 
is a record of continuous advance. In 1815 the 
series of inventions collectively known as the 
Industrial Revolution had as yet affected little more 
than Great Britain ; in the course of the succeed- 
ing generations they gradually made their way 



THE UPHEAVAL 27 

eastwards, till by the close of our period even Russia 
had been drawn into the orbit of industriahsm, 
and of the ideas and doctrines awakened by or in 
reaction against it. Europe became threaded with 
railways, telegraphs, and telephones ; her old 
centres of traffic and population — Paris, Frankfurt, 
Berlin, Milan, Vienna, Madrid — acquired new 
influence and momentum as ganglia of a newly 
developed nervous system ; the Continent became 
linked together by all the international contrivances 
of nineteenth-century commercialism and enterprise, 
from banks and accepting houses and stock markets 
to sleeping-cars and cinema films ; whilst, inside 
the larger unity, the German and Austro-Hungarian 
Customs unions, the pohtical union of Italy, the 
extension of the Russian fiscal system to Poland 
and Finland, and the abolition of the cantonal 
customs in Switzerland, and of similar obstacles 
to free intercourse in other states, created a number 
of smaller but still substantial economic units with 
administrative systems which became constantly 
more powerful as more burdens were laid upon them 
by the growing movement for state action and social 
reform. By 1914 Europe as a whole was opened 
up to the influences of modern industriahsm, and 
her life, and that of her separate states, in increasing 
measure from west to east, was organized on the 
basis of the international division of labour. In 
other words, she had ceased, throughout the whole 
of her area, to be self-contained and self-sufficient, 
and had become a member — the most important 
and central member — of an economic system 
world-wide in its organization and connections. 
Able to draw on the raw materials of the overseas 



28 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

world for her manufactures, she was steadily 
increasing both in prosperity and population, and, 
in proportion as each of her communities became 
industrialized, its flow of emigration diminished 
and its sons were able to earn their livelihood out 
of its developing trade and manufactures. Well 
before 1914, for instance, Germany (so often wrongly 
described as burdened with a surplus population) 
was receiving more immigrants than she sent out 
emigrants, and of her seventy million inhabitants 
some eighteen million were directly or indirectly 
dependent for their livelihood upon her overseas 
commerce. Mr, Hoover, looking at the Continent 
as a whole, with the wide-ranging eye of an American 
accustomed to the broad, unimpeded spaces of the 
United States, has estimated that, as a result of 
this process of industrialization and consequent 
dependence upon oversea connections, there were 
in war-time Europe of 1918, a hundred million more 
persons than the Continent could support out of 
its own natural resources. 

Such was the system under which men earned 
their bread in Europe when the leading sea-power 
declared war against the leading land-power, and 
cut the greater part of Europe off from the world. 
The result, after four and a half years of imprison- 
ment and isolation, was an economic transformation 
even more drastic and far-reaching than the political 
changes by which it was accompanied. If the 
strategic history of the war is ever written under 
its true name it will be entitled The Siege of Europe. 
The blockade was indeed the decisive instrument 
of AlUed power, and it has altered the economic 
life of Europe beyond recognition. 



THE UPHEAVAL 29 

Walther Rathenau, lately Minister of Reconstruc- 
tion in the German Government, one of the ablest 
all-round minds in that land of specialists, has 
described in an interesting pamphlet the effect 
produced upon him by the news of the British 
declaration of war. He realized in a flash that, in 
default of a rapid victory, such as he, unlike most 
Germans, did not count upon, it meant the drying 
up of the major sources of his country's prosperity, 
and, even more than that, a deficiency in the raw 
materials and foodstuffs essential to the carrying 
on of war and to the maintenance of a civiHzed 
standard of hfe. No civiHzed country, still 
less an industrial country, can hve without 
cotton and wool for her clothing, hides for 
her boots, rubber and oil for her transport, jute to 
make sacks for her heavy goods, phosphate and 
nitrates to manure her fields, palm-oil for soap, and 
the numberless other natural products and com- 
modities which Germany and every European 
country had become accustomed to draw from 
overseas. He carried his misgivings to the War 
Office, where, thanks to the prestige of German 
mihtarism in attracting good brains to its service, 
they were not only listened to patiently, but acted 
on with exemplary promptitude. Within less than 
a week Rathenau had been installed as head of the 
Raw Materials Department of the German War 
Office, and was engaged in buying up such stores of 
the necessary materials as he could lay hands on in 
the adjoining neutral countries, against whom 
Britain had not yet perfected her machinery of 
blockade. Rathenau's initiative averted an im- 
mediate crisis, but neither he nor his ingenious 



30 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

colleague, Helfferich, deviser of the commercial 
submarine, could alter the fundamental facts of 
the situation. Marshal Foch led the Allied troops 
to victory on the Western Front, but it was the 
deficiency of cotton and wool, of jute and hides 
and fats, which accelerated the decline and 
eventually administered the coup de grace behind 
the enemy's ranks. Allied statesmen and soldiers 
who, even after the Bulgarian armistice, expected 
the German army to go on fighting through the 
winter in the mud of Flanders, might have stopped 
to ask themselves whether they would have the 
boots to fight in. Let it be mentioned in passing 
as a curious fact, and an example of the blunders 
from which not even the most perfect organization 
can preserve a government of specialists working 
in water-tight compartments, that, whilst the 
military and financial arrangements in the event 
of war had been thought out to the last detail, 
its industrial reactions had been completely lost 
sight of, and that by a culminating irony, the 
organization which, in one department, had pigeon- 
holed its scheme for the invasion of Belgium in 
defiance of a solemn international engagement, 
was, in another department, relying upon British 
sea-power to adhere to the strict letter of an inter- 
national agreement, not even ratified by its Govern- 
ment, in its action towards the commerce of the 
adjoining neutrals. " You will always be fools 
and we shall never be gentlemen," seems to have 
been an unquestioned assumption of the policy 
of the Kaiser's Government towards Britain. 

The economic history of the war-years is the 
record of a society, hitherto united in a single 



THE UPHEAVAL 31 

world-wide system of intercourse, suddenly divided 
into two. On the one side there is Britain and 
the overseas world, together with France, Italy, 
Holland, Spain and Portugal, Greece, Scandinavia, 
and Switzerland ; on the other there is the vast 
blockaded area extending in Bethmann-Hollweg's 
words, " from Arras to Mesopotamia." For four and 
a half years these two worlds existed side by side, 
touching one another only at the trenches or through 
the carefully regulated relations of neutrals, each 
concentrating its whole strength upon the single 
purpose of overthrowing the opposing organization, 
so lately a part of its own. Viewed from the economic 
standpoint, the struggle was a civil war within 
what Graham Wallas has taught us to call " the 
Great Society." 

The attempts made, with increasing success as 
the struggle went on, to organize each of the new 
systems for its purpose, embody the most interesting 
experiments ever made in the collective control and 
distribution of the world's resources, and it is to be 
hoped that the authorities of the Carnegie Endow- 
ment, who have undertaken to record them, will 
succeed in their task before the details have escaped 
the minds of the responsible officials.* 

So far as the AlHes are concerned, the organization 
was throughout a co-operation of independent 
Governments, and, though it had reached, by 
the autumn of 1918, a high degree of central 
control, especially in regard to shipping and the 
sea-borne commodities for which the AlHed 
Maritime Transport Council was responsible, it 

'One of these, Mr. J. A. Salter, has lately written the story of the 
Allied Shipping Control (Oxford, 1921). 



32 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

always retained a large measure of elasticity. 
There was no great difficulty, therefore, though 
there was great unwisdom, in its disbandment in the 
winter of 1918-1919. 

It was otherwise in the blockaded area. Here, 
authority, originally divided between five nominally 
independent Governments (for Austria and Hungary 
counted for civil purposes as two) became increas- 
ingly concentrated in the hands of the German 
General Staff until, by the latter part of 1918, 
Ludendorff, the right-hand and controlling brain 
of the Commander-in-Chief, was exercising over an 
empire larger than that of Napoleon at the height of 
his power a detailed control such as only a com- 
bination of irresistible military force with perfected 
modern means of transport and communication 
could have rendered possible. There is a fascinating 
book to be written by a student of administration on 
the incessant conflicts between the German soldiers 
and their civilian colleagues in the five countries and 
the invaded regions respectively assigned to them, 
ranging over the whole field of affairs, from military 
and naval strategy in their bearings upon foreign 
policy and pubHc opinion at home and abroad to 
transport food supply, finance, the conscription of 
labour, and, finally, the statement of war aims, and 
the moment and method of negotiations. Helfferich, 
Czernin, and others have lifted here and there a 
corner of the curtain — enough to reveal to us that 
the economic organization of the blockaded area 
was not only militarist in spirit, as it was bound to 
be, but often planned by the mihtary authorities 
themselves. 

Let us look for a moment at what this task of 



THE UPHEAVAL 33 

organization involved. We can leave aside for this 
purpose the allies or dependents of Germany, who, 
being, except in Bohemia, less industriahzed in 
their development, had not to meet the problem in 
its full vigour, and confine ourselves to the pre- 
dominant partner. Cut off as she was from access 
to some of her most essential raw materials and food- 
stuffs, she required to readjust her whole economic 
life on a basis of self-sufficiency. This involved a 
process of overhauling, of economization, of the 
adaptation of old agencies and instruments to new 
ends which could not but be ruthless to innumerable 
private interests. Where the EngHsh, inveterate 
individuaUsts even when their national destiny was 
shivering in the balances, granted exemption from 
service to the owners of " one-man businesses," the 
Germans surveyed their trades and industries whole- 
sale, and put the smaller and less efficient under- 
takings out of business. SuppHes of every kind, if 
deemed of sufficient importance, were com- 
mandeered, placed under control, subjected to 
maximum pricing, and often rationed. Factories 
and workshops were directed by administrative 
order from one branch of production to another, 
and whole new industries such as the winning of 
nitrate from the air, the manufacture of poison 
gas, and the making of innumerable substitutes, 
from acorn coffee to paper shirts, were brought 
into existence with the aid of pubhc money. 
Finally, labour was deprived of freedom of 
contract, and workmen and workwomen were 
assigned by the State authority to the particular 
niche where they were deemed most useful. The 
great industrial interests always closely linked with 
Ce 



34 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

the German State, co-operated with the bureaucracy 
in effecting this transformation. A vast new system 
of State-controlled capitalist production was thus 
brought into being, and from 191 6 onwards, plans 
were being worked out by experts on behalf of the 
two parties for its conversion to peace purposes after 
the close of hostilities. The course of the war had 
brought home to the Prussian mind the importance 
of maintaining an Economic, as well as a military and 
financial. General Staff, and the books of Naumann 
and Rathenau, with their characteristic German 
blending of romanticism and rigidit}^, idealism and 
organization, are eloquent of the direction in 
which the governing minds of Germany were 
turning. 

But all these projects — indeed, all possibilit}' of 
emerging from the abnormal conditions of the 
blockade without widespread confusion and anarchy 
— depended upon access to an adequate supply of 
industrial raw materials. For all the time the 
Germany of Ludendorff and Helfferich was perfect- 
ing her war organization her supplies were steadily 
running out, and with them the financial resources 
and the credit-power needed for replenishing them 
from their oversea sources. Hence in November 
1918, the master problem for Germany, and for all 
the industrial regions of the blockaded area, from 
Northern France and Belgium to Bohemia, Lower 
Austria, and Poland, was that of securing industrial 
raw materials. This was far more important than 
the problem of food-supply, for food is of little use 
to working-class populations unless they have the 
money to buy it with ; moreover, by ceasing 
hostilities in the early winter the German authorities 



THE UPHEAVAL 35 

provided a margin of time, available for the import 
of industrial raw materials, before the suppHes of 
the previous harvest were exhausted. They had 
even more time in hand in October, 1918, than they 
reckoned to have when they offered peace in the 
December of 1916. Peace, they knew, involved 
the demobihzation of milHons of men. These men 
needed immediate employment, if confusion, and 
worse than confusion, were to be avoided. Employ- 
ment involved raw materials. Raw materials, 
then, were the pivot of the European situation. 
If the transformation from war to peace conditions 
was to be effected peacefully in face of the menaces 
of Moscow, and of the Ughtheadedness which was 
bound to follow the sudden cessation of the war- 
strain after years of effort and underfeeding, if 
chimneys were to begin smoking again in the 
blockaded area, from Lille to Lodz, and from 
Brussels to the industrial suburbs of Buda-Pesth, 
there must be a concerted European policy for 
getting the Continent back to work. Once the 
materials were provided there would be no difficulty 
in selling them, for employment sets money in 
circulation, and every housewife in the blockaded 
area, and most in the submarine-menaced countries, 
had her hst of necessary purchases. 

Such was the problem presented in November, 
1918, to the Allied statesmen who, through their 
perfected system of inter-allied organization, held 
the greater part of the shipping, the raw materials, 
the foodstuffs, and the credit-power of the world, 
either jointly or individually, in their grasp. How 
did they proceed to handle it ? The answer to this 
also must be left for a later page. 



36 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 
CHAPTER III 

THE UPHEAVAL OF IDEAS 

The world of ideas in which men's minds were 
moving in 1914 was in close relation with the external 
order of European life and society. The nineteenth 
century, and more especially the latter half of it, 
had placed its chief effort and aspiration in the 
tasks of material development. Society in other 
ages had paid respect to the thinker and the artist, 
even to the saint. The men whom pre-war society 
chiefly delighted to honour were those endowed 
with the particular combination of will-power, 
technical knowledge, and quickness of insight and 
decision, which constitutes the make-up of a success- 
ful organizer of men and machines. Not the lonely 
inventors whose ideas, once set in motion, have 
changed the outward aspect of our civilization, 
but the bustUng promoters and advertisers who 
were able to act as their sponsors in the market- 
place, won the recognition and the rewards which 
every community reserves for those who come 
nearest to the unspoken ideal of its members. Life 
had become more comfortable than ever before in 
human history — a material paradise for the rich, 
and if not a gilded, at least an insured and cushioned 
cage for the less fortunate classes. And every 
increase in material well-being, every rise in the 
trade returns, savings bank deposits, and other 
statistical evidences of the prosperity which men 
mistook for happiness, stimulated the appetite for 
more of the same feeding. It is the characteristic 
of money, as the Greeks remarked long ago, that 



THE UPHEAVAL 37 

it is infinite, that there is no limit to the amount 
of it that can either be possessed or desired. A 
society, which had made money its god and had 
elevated its conception of the indispensables to 
happiness to the motor-car standard, had set itself 
to the task of compassing the infinite. The result, 
despite the soHd outward evidence of successful 
achievement, was a deep and ever-growing dissatis- 
faction, a hngering malaise and restlessness, the full 
extent of which was only revealed when the war 
swept the old society, and its gods and sanctions, 
into the abyss of the past. 

A. Political Doctrines 

This material ideal, if ideal it can be called, 
dominated both the pohtical parties and the other 
organized intellectual influences of pre-war Europe. 
The party system exhibited characteristic varieties 
and comphcations in the different countries, but, 
broadly speaking, the political Hfe of the European 
peoples found its expression in three groups — the 
Conservatives (amongst whom must be included 
the clericals), the Liberals, and the SociaHsts. 

Conservatism, strongest in Spain and Russia but 
powerful also in Britain, France, and Germany, 
was the stronghold of those who cared for authority, 
for stabiUty, for the comfortable regime of use and 
wont. Its traditions reached back to the counter- 
revolutionary movement of the beginning and 
middle of the century, to 1789, 1815, and 1848 ; 
but the vital meaning of those conflicts, which had 
been so real to Burke and le Maistre, to Mettemich 
and Wellington, and later to Bismarck and the 



38 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

anti-Republicans of his generation, had become 
obhterated with the passage of time and the decHne 
or debasement of the old revolutionary issues. With 
the withering of its intellectual tradition, Con- 
servatism had relapsed more and more into an 
attitude of obstinate and unthinking defence ; and 
if it be asked what it was that the French bourgeois 
and the German Junker, the Spanish clerical, the 
English Tory and the Russian bureaucrat were 
united in defending, the answer is more easily 
given in concrete than in abstract terms. Not " the 
principles of the Revolution," nor " Church and 
State," nor " Kaiser and Fatherland," still less, as 
is sometimes impertinently claimed in Spain, the 
social principles of the Christian Church and Gospel, 
formed the inspiration of those who in each country 
set themselves to oppose ideas of political and social 
change. To be defenders of the established order 
meant, in 1914, in RepubUcan France as in monar- 
chical Spain and democratic England, to be defenders 
of Property. 

LiberaUsm had an adventurous and inspiring 
ancestry to boast of, but by 1914 its laurels had 
faded, and its prestige was every\\'here on the 
wane. Originating in seventeenth-century England 
and eighteenth-century France as the exponent of 
what EngUsh writers called British liberty, and 
their French colleagues, as characteristically, the 
Rights of Man, it had developed during the wars of 
the Revolution into a movement for the liberation 
and the poUtical independence of nations. In the 
writings of its greatest nineteenth-century prophet, 
Mazzini, the two strains, the individual and the 
national, are inextricably blended, running together 



THE UPHEAVAL 39 

with a warm current of social idealism. His watch- 
word, " God and the People," sums up a whole world 
of aspiration, and conceals the inner conflict which 
was bound to arise when, to use a modern phrase, 
individual and national self-determination pointed 
in different directions, or when the people became 
more interested in the social than in the nationalist 
aspects of Mazzini's appeal. These divergent and 
often contradictory elements in the Liberal creed 
became more manifest as the century developed. 
When Bismarck estabhshed a United German 
Empire by his sovereign recipe of blood and iron, 
and when Slav, Greek, and Roumanian, Japanese 
and Indian enthusiasts began to apply the nationahst 
ideas of Western Europe to their own problems and 
conditions, the humanitarian elements in Mazzini's 
composite gospel often seemed far to seek. During 
the generation prior to the war Liberal nationalism 
had ceased, except in Ireland, to be a powerful 
influence in Western Europe, but it was gathering 
strength, visibly and beneath the surface, not only 
in south-eastern and north-eastern Europe, from 
the Baltic to the Adriatic and the Black Sea, but 
among ardent and susceptible minds throughout 
Asia and Africa. But the nationalism of such 
agitations was often more apparent than their 
LiberaUsm, and, though it is impossible to deny a 
Liberal character to a movement which can point 
to such figures as Masaryk, Venizelos, and Gandhi 
among its leaders, they would be the last to deny 
that they have had a hard struggle to wage against 
the baser spirits who are ever on the watch to 
vulgarize nationahsm into an arrogant and intolerant 
manifestation of mere herd-gregariousness. 



40 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

After the union of Gennany and of Italy, Liberalism 
in Western Europe was weakened by the disilhision- 
ing realization of part of its nationalist programme, 
while the war of 1S70, followed, contrary to Bis- 
marck's better judgment, by the annexation of 
Alsace-Lorraine, contributed still further to its 
eclipse. Prussia bestrode the Continent, and whilst 
Bismarck, strong in the argument of the fa if accompli, 
was ^^'inning over his old Liberal opponents to the 
twin causes of absolutism and industriiil etliciency. 
Liberals in other countries lost enthusiasm and 
incentive, conscious of a dead weight of reaction 
in the centre of the Continent which the mere force 
of ideas was powerless to dislodge. Bismarck's 
abandonment of Free Trade in 1S79 marks the 
beginning of a rapid ebb in the fortunes of the 
Manchester School, a characteristically English 
combination of internationalism and good business 
which, thanks to the initiative of Napoleon IIL, 
had become the fashion in the Chancellories of 
Europe during the third quarter of the century. 
In the period between the Franco-German war 
and IQ14, Liberalism, as an influence upon foreign 
poUcy, upon the mutUvil relations of the European 
peoples, was thus driven more and more imder- 
ground. Its vague humanitarian formulae were 
indeed too famihar and too non-committal to be 
discarded by the rulei"S of Europe, nor had any 
others equally safe and convenient yet been de\ised 
to take their place. But the peace and goodwill 
promoted by Bismarck on behalf of a " satiated " 
Germany were very different in spirit from the 
watchwords of the promotei-s of the Great Exhibition 
of 1S51, and the international brotherhood of 



THE UPHEAVAL 41 

peoples preached by Nicholas II., when he sum- 
moned the first Hague Conference, was something 
far removed from the faith of Mazzini or the French 
Liberals of '48. It was in the lands whither the 
strong arm of Potsdam could not penetrate, behind 
the bulwark of British sea-power, that the inter- 
nationalist doctrines of LiberaHsm, with their 
vision of a world of free peoples bound together to 
keep humanity at peace, were now most sincerely 
professed — shyly and by small semi-religious coteries 
in Britain, more exuberantly and unquestioningly 
in the United States. Thus it was that Liberalism, 
far from the haunts of mihtary power and from 
the reahties emphasized by its rule, shed much of 
its European experience, and assumed an abstract 
and too exclusively Anglo-Saxon character ; and 
it was in this guise that it emerged once more during 
the war, in the careful formulations of Asquith 
and the bold and sonorous preachments of Woodrow 
Wilson, to exercise, for a few brief and dazzling 
months, a predominant influence over the public 
opinion of Europe. 

Meanwhile, in the domestic sphere. Liberals 
found the simple and harmonious solutions of 
Mazzini, and of mid-century Christian idealists in 
Britain and elsewhere, no easier of appUcation. 
In the increasing complexity and dehumanization 
of the industrial system, with the growth of joint 
stock companies and impersonal controls, fraternity 
and co-operation, and even hberty and equahty, 
supplied little positive guidance. Unable or unwill- 
ing to dig deeper, to re-analyse the nature of modem 
man, and to assess, in terms of quahty rather than 
of quantity, the values of modern civilization, 



42 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

and faced with the crude and garish competition 
of the Sociahst gospel, Liberalism surrendered its 
integrity and took refuge in compromise. Thus 
it survived, botli in Britain and on the Continent, 
not as the pioneer of a new world of personal freedom 
and social justice, but as a party of moderate and 
ameliorating reform. There, too, the great tradi- 
tional watchwords sur\aved, especially in perorations 
and in election programmes, but, to use a famous 
phrase of Gladstone's, they were " tempered by 
prudence," and also, let it be added, by a regard 
for economy characteristic of what was always, 
even at its zenith, a bourgeois party. Common 
sense and evolution, two idols of a " practical " 
age, took their place beside the older and more 
exalted declarations of policy ; for a society in 
which men surrendered themselves freely to the 
velocity of machines had become increasingly 
terrified of the swift and sweeping initiatives of 
the human mind. Social progress, young Liberals 
were told, must come slowly and by instalments, 
by the same gradual, and indeed imperceptible, stages 
as marked the advance of modern London upon 
ancient Athens, and of a mammoth American 
factory upon the workshop of a Phidias and a Fra 
Angelico. Progress, so interpreted, is the creed 
of a middle-aged and disillusioned movement. 
Small wonder that by 1914 youth and enthusiasm 
were being attracted to other and ruddier banners. 
SociaUsm, the political doctrine, or rather the 
rehgion, professed by the vast majority of the 
industrial working class of Europe in 1914, is a 
characteristic product of the sj^stem which it is 
designed to overturn or to transform. Its 



THE UPHEAVAL 43 

latest historian has indeed industriously laid 
bare the intellectual origins of its leading ideas, 
tracing some of them back to eighteenth and early 
nineteenth-century England and France, and others, 
with characteristic German conscientiousness, to the 
Middle Ages and behind them ; and it is true that 
the movement had a brief vogue in England before 
it became solidified in Germany, and that there is 
the closest resemblance, even to the metaphors and 
the phraseology, between the infant Socialism of the 
Poor Man's Guardian in the early eighteen-thirties, 
and the diluted Bolshevism of the Daily Herald 
in 1922. But it was in the Western Europe 
of the forties, when the factory system in 
England was working up to the climax which 
excited the denunciations of Lord Shaftesbury, 
and when France under Louis Philippe was adding 
a new and sinister connotation to the term bourgeois, 
that Karl Marx, an uprooted Jew from the Rhine 
country, who, after brief spells in Paris and Brussels, 
spent most of his Ufe in London and most of his 
working days in the Library of the British Museum, 
crystallized what had hitherto been a vague and 
formless conglomerate of theories and discontents 
into a systematic and imposing structure of ideas 
and propaganda. Marx surveyed the world of 
nineteenth-century industriahsm and saw that it was 
bad. His diagnosis of the maladies of society was 
as scientific and as accurate as any hitherto under- 
taken, and his indictment of our so-called civilization 
was, and remains, unanswerable. Regarded simply 
as a rebel, as a prophet of industrial protestantism, 
he is immune from criticism, except the one re- 
minder that, in a world in which the classes, like 



44 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

the peoples, have of necessity to hve together, 
protestantism, Hke patriotism, is not enough. 
Where he failed in insight was in believing that he 
could bring about a better world by transforming the 
organization of society without transforming its 
values. Thus he became the adored chief of a 
movement, indeed of a Church, which, just because 
its doctrine of the age-long struggle between the 
master-class and the proletarian, with the ine\dtable 
and nearly-impending victory of the latter in a 
glorious revolution, pointed to everyday facts and 
appealed to elemental passions and desires, needed 
only to perfect its propaganda, and to apply the 
right tinge of red in the right place for each trade 
and locality, to attract multitudes to its banner. For 
to the victims of modern industriahsm, in the 
monotonous and mechanical routine of their daily 
existence, its message of upheaval corresponded to 
an inner craving for free initiative and activity. 

SociaHsm has made its waj^ in modern society 
much after the same fashion as Christianity made 
its way in the Roman Empire. Its message has 
appealed to the same section — the more restless 
and aspiring members of what were considered the 
inferior classes — and it has brought the same good 
tidings of a better time to come. As has been well 
said by an acute modern Jewish critic, SociaHsm 
is indeed little more than a pocket edition of 
the old Jewish Messianic idea, or, it may be 
added, in its latest East European form, of 
the fervours and furies of Islam. So it is 
piquant to observe how it has suffered, and is 
now suffering more than ever, from a disappoint- 
ment, and an intellectual embarrassment, very 



THE UPHEAVAL 45 

similar to that which confronted the first generation 
of Christian converts as the date of the Second 
Coming seemed to be receding year by year. The 
modern Socialist is indeed in a far more difficult 
situation than his predecessors ; for, whereas they 
could do no more than sit still and wait on the event, 
the duty of the modern apostle, who has pitched his 
promised denouement in the midst of this world's 
affairs, is to labour to bring the transformation 
about ; and this involves the creation and main- 
tenance of a vast and necessarily material organiza- 
tion, which requires to be kept at a religious level 
of faith, enthusiasm, and expectation by a constant 
reiteration or variation of the Messianic promise of 
a new world. For those who are old enough to have 
watched the rise and wane of the hopes and ideals 
of more than one generation of young Socialist 
enthusiasts there is something inexpressibly 
melancholy in the spectacle of the power still 
exercised by what one of its Oxford exponents has, 
with unconscious cynicism, entitled " the revolu- 
tionary tradition " over the minds of simple and 
credulous men and women. What could be more 
pathetic, for instance, than to read, in the report 
of the International Socialist Conference, held in 
Vienna in February, 1921, of a German-Bohemian 
delegate, who, representing the debris of a party at 
a conference of the debris of a movement meeting 
in the debris of a metropoUs, declares, in the perora- 
tion of an impeccably orthodox address, that he 
returns home more convinced than ever " that the 
Marxian doctrines, the revered ideas transmitted to 
us by our great teachers, have been in no way shaken 
or affected by the war, but remain everlastingly 



46 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

true " ? These are the words of faith, not of reason, 
of religion, not of politics, of other-vvorldliness, not 
of this-worldliness. When the time and place of 
their deUvery are considered, they may be taken as 
summing up, not inaptly, the whole strength, and 
the whole inner weakness and contradiction, of the 
modern revolutionary movement. 

This contradiction serves also to explain another 
characteristic phenomenon of SociaUsm — the con- 
stant disharmony and tug and strain between 
leaders and followers. Since Socialism is a this- 
worldly movement, it must needs be organized on a 
material scale, and from this it follows that its 
leaders are necessarily chosen from amongst those 
who understand the arts of organization. But 
a SociaUst leader must also possess the power 
of popular appeal, or he will be unable to command 
the enthusiasm, or retain the confidence, of the 
masses whom he serves. Leadership has tended, 
therefore, to pass into the hands of men who com- 
bine, often in unequal and always in uncomfortable 
measure, the talents of the platform and of the 
desk, of the mob-orator and the bureaucrat ; and 
this is especially the case in countries where, as in 
Britain, the association between the Trade Union 
and Socialist movements is so close that the leaders 
of the former tend, almost as of right, to rise to 
prominence in the latter. It is the characteristic 
defect of young and growing churches to lay too 
many worldly burdens on their apostles, to confound 
the work of bishop and deacon, of preacher and 
administrator ; but never perhaps has this blunder 
been committed on so vast a scale as when men who 
are responsible, as paid officials, for the conduct of 



THE UPHEAVAL 47 

a huge mutual benefit society of miners or railway- 
men, are expected also to play the part of prophet, 
preacher, and pioneer to the eager masses of their 
followers. Small wonder that, on the one side, the 
prophet should more and more be swallowed up in 
the reformist poUtician, and that, on the other, 
enthusiasm, ill-led and misrepresented, should break 
out in recurring, if impotent, movements of discon- 
tent. The surprise is rather that the nimbleness of 
leaders and the patience of followers has stood the 
strain so long. A better division of labour may be 
devised, defects of organization may be patched 
up, programmes and formulae may be revised and 
readapted ; but there is no permanent health in the 
revolutionary movement but by a courageous return 
to first principles, by a reassessment of the values of 
our civilization and of the 'issues which confront 
those who seek to amend it. So long as the move- 
ment remains on the economic plane, the plane of 
the Marxian analysis, it will be paralysed by an 
inner contradiction ; for it is seeking to bring about 
a revolution in a region where no revolution is 
possible, where, the closer men approach to the 
seat of power, the more practical, governmental, and 
conservative they must needs become. Even before 
1 914 it had become clear that Socialism had reached 
the cross-roads ; that its choice lay between remain- 
ing on the material plane and embracing a reformist 
Liberalism shorn of the main features of the 
Marxian ideology, or boldly admitting, as the 
second generation of Christians admitted, the 
hteral inadequacy of its earher message, and trans- 
ferring its activity to a plane where economic 
problems can be seen in their true hght, as one, if not 



48 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

the least important, of the issues involved in the 
effort to bring harmony and happiness into the 
lives of the men and women of to-day. 

Such were the political doctrines between which 
the allegiance of European pubhc opinion was 
divided in 1914. Upon them the war descended 
like a thunderclap. Conservatism was the first 
to feel the shock ; for, as Sir Edward Grey told 
Count Mensdorff in July, 19 14, a European conflagra- 
tion meant the end of the old comfortable world of 
use and wont, in which awkward questions of 
principle could be ignored like sleeping dogs. Both 
on the Continent and in Britain the war has brought 
an awakening, especially among the younger 
generation, which spells the death of the old Con- 
servatism, and of the vis inertice, and the respect 
for custom and authority, which were its strongest 
bulwark. The old world has been reluctant to 
die ; nevertheless it has passed away beyond recall. 
The Tyrolese burgomaster who signalized the 
change of regime in his village by setting up the 
sign of the " Imperial-Royal Republic " {K.K. 
Repiihlik) is an apt example of the way in which 
what is after all a determining transition has been 
made in the minds of millions of custom-loving 
men and women. 

But it was the Sociahst preachers of revolution 
who were perhaps the most disconcerted by the 
advent of an upheaval which they had so frequently 
foretold and so long ceased to expect ; for it 
developed contrary to their theories, and, what is 
even more serious for a good party man, contrary 
to the plans and interests of their organization. 
It brought to a head the inner conflict in the party 



THE UPHEAVAL 49 

between the men of practice and the men of theory, 
between those who were wiUing to co-operate with 
bourgeois governments and those who stood aloof 
from the fooHsh issues and suicidal dissensions of 
capitalist society — in a word, between the patriots 
and the internationalists. Not that there was a 
clean division of ranks under the impact of fact ; 
that, as a rule, took time to develop, for organiza- 
tions, however inhuman, have generally acquired 
a human quality of self-protection. Many and 
ingenious, therefore, were the endeavours of the 
faithful and conscientious followers of Marx, 
particularly in Germany and Austria, to adapt the 
texts of the master to the dramatic and testing 
events of the day. The curious reader will find a 
record of him in the pages of a German review — 
the Archiv fiir Sozialwissenschaft. There were some 
who held, with Karl Renner, that a German 
supremacy over Eastern Europe and the estabhsh- 
ment of a United States from Hamburg to Bagdad, 
under the control of a single Economic General 
Staff, was an exempUfication of the Marxian doctrine 
of the supremacy of big businesses over small, and 
of the growing trustification of the industrial world ; 
while others, more honest if less inventive, Uke 
Karl Kautsky, found it not incompatible with their 
Marxism to protest against the principle, and the 
proposed method, of the absorption of Belgium. 
But the coolest and clearest head in the movement 
was that of an extremist Russian nobleman long 
resident in Switzerland, Heedless of the incon- 
sistency involved in initiating a world-revolution 
in the most industrially backward country of 
Europe, Lenin fixed on Russia as the focus of 
De 



50 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

Socialist activity ; and he had the perspicacity to 
see that, ^vith the capitaHst governments at grips, 
those who sought to destroy them must not idly 
stand aside, but rather seek to extend and embitter 
the conflict. So it was Lenin who, at Zimmerwald 
in 1915, looking round for a weapon of disintegra- 
tion, saw that the nationaUst appeal would meet 
his end. Few of the Liberals who used it with 
such dramatic effect in the later stages of the war 
reaUzed that it was Lenin, aiming at the disintegra- 
tion of the great multi-national empire and society 
of Russia, and, with luck and persistence, of other 
empires as well, who sprang upon a susceptible 
public the stirring watchword of self-determination. 
Here is indeed an apple of strife from Finland to 
Croatia and Catalonia, and from Ireland to the 
Ukraine ; but, unfortunately for the progress of 
the world-revolution that it was destined to in- 
augurate, it was a strife that could not fail to 
penetrate the revolutionary party itself. Thus the 
Second International, fruit of the patient and 
careful — indeed, too careful — labours of a Jaures, 
and a Vandervelde, a Bebel, a Keir Hardie, and a 
Turati, suffered the experience of schism, like so 
many churches before it, and the end of the war 
found a Third International both more orthodox 
and more menacing than its predecessor, issuing 
its thunders, not from some occasional conference 
or obscure secretariat under the shadow of a 
capitaUst government, but from the Kremlin at 
Moscow, 

It was the Liberals, whom, for this reason, we 
have left to the last, who had the most reason, if 
not to welcome (for of the three parties, they were 



THE UPHEAVAL 51 

the most averse to bloodshed), at least to under- 
stand the war ; for it was in line with their theory 
of European development, and with their sense of 
values and estimate of forces. They were, indeed, 
so deadened by fifty years of Prussian supremacy, by 
the dominance of blood and iron over ideas and 
ideals, that it took them some time to discover that 
there was more at stake for Europe, and for their 
several countries, than self-defence, and that 
much which had been " Utopian," and therefore 
supremely attractive, for fifty and even a hundred 
years, was now becoming severely practical 
politics. But when, under the teaching of a 
Masaryk and a Benes, and their able Jugo-slav 
colleagues, not to mention Paderewski and 
Dmowski, they awoke to the situation, they fell, 
not unnaturally, into the opposite error, and 
both hoped and believed too much ; or, perhaps, 
it would be truer to say of the statesmen of the 
Entente that, too preoccupied to surrender their 
minds either to hopes or beliefs, they repeated pre 
cepts and perorations, which caused their less ex- 
perienced followers to hope and believe far more than 
themselves. So, in spite of the Itahan Treaty of 1915, 
of which English Liberals, at any rate, were made 
aware, although they chose to turn a blind eye to it, 
the formulae of Liberalism became the order of the 
day, and that not in their European, but in their most 
Anglo-Saxon and idealistic setting. First London, 
and then Washington, became the seat of the oracle 
of prophecy and propaganda ; and, in the heat and 
anguish of the struggle, cool heads were too pre- 
occupied, and no doubt also too confidently sceptical, 
to interfere with argument and criticism. Thus it 



52 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

was that by 191 8, when the fabric of Prussianism 
collapsed, and the ground lay clear and ready for 
rebuilding, Europe had already been converted to 
Liberalism. All that was needed, and all that was 
expected, was for the victors to set to work upon the 
building of which they had already passed, and made 
public, the specifications. When President Wilson 
informed the German Government, on November 5, 
191 8, that the AlHes had accepted his " Fourteen 
Points " and other addresses as the basis of the 
peace which was about to be negotiated, the mixid 
of Continental Europe, and especially of Germany, 
leaped back sevent}^ years, to the ideals and enthu- 
siasms of 184S. Before many weeks were out, it was 
not 1848, but 1648, of which they spoke. But to 
this we shall turn present^. 

B. Institutions 

But our view of the pre-war world, and our sense 
of the upheaval to which it has been subjected, will 
not be complete until we have extended our survey 
to other and less purely political influences, to the 
institutions which, in our modern society, serve as 
the recognized agencies for the origination and 
diffusion of ideas. The chief of these — ^^to cite them 
in inverse order to their antiquity, if not to their 
potency — are the Press, the University, and the 
Church. 

The daily newspaper is the principal means by 
which pubhc opinion — the life-blood of the modern 
state, as of its parties and other groupings — is 
formed and nourished ; it supplies both the informa- 
tion and the explanatory comment which are the 



THE UPHEAVAL 53 

raw material of a reasoned judgment upon public 
affairs. It is, therefore, placed in a position of 
peculiar advantage for seconding the efforts of the 
statesman in educating his fellow-countrymen upon 
current issues. In the modern democracy the plat- 
form and the Press, the orator and the editor, should 
be natural aUies in the task of popular enlighten- 
ment. The work which falls to the latter 's share is 
indeed one of the most essential pubUc services in 
the whole range of the life of a civilized community, 
and, on the whole, a glance at the files of the 
principal European newspapers of the nineteenth 
century, and at the distinguished list of their contri- 
butors, would reveal that this responsibility was 
neither unrecognized nor ill discharged. In recent 
years, however, the Press has extended its sway and 
discovered its power to assume even more potent 
functions. For the vast new, inquisitive, and semi- 
emancipated public brought into existence through- 
out Europe by compulsory schooling it plays the 
part, not merely of purveyor and interpreter of 
news, but of teacher and preacher, guide, philosopher, 
and anonymous but unremitting companion. The 
power of the written word has never been so strong — 
not even in the early days of Protestantism, when 
the Book was almighty — than among the uncritical 
millions who pin their faith to what they have 
" seen in the paper." The cold majesty of print, 
surrounded by the pomp and circumstance of 
headline and editorial elaboration, persuades or 
intimidates all but those who have consciously 
trained themselves to resist. Emperors have not 
known such intimate and continuing power, nor 
the Vatican such audacious and unquestioned 



54 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

infallibility, as is enjoyed by those who have 
mastered the art of catching the ear, or tickling the 
palate, of what is called by courtesy the reading 
public. 

For the spread of industriahsm, and of the 
standard of values and habits of hfe associated with 
it, both among rich and poor, has coincided, during 
the last half-century, and especially during the last 
twenty years, with a decline both in the quahty and 
in the integrity of the Press. As, on the one hand, 
the public has become more receptive than ever 
before to manufactured opinions and ready-made 
ideas and arguments, so, on the other, the proprietors 
and purveyors of the printed word, neglectful of 
their responsibility towards the intellectual life of 
the community, have lost sight, more and more, of 
their informative and educative function, and have 
surrendered themselves to the temptations of com- 
mercial success. Here and there, to take instances 
from Britain which might be parallelled in France, 
Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, a C. P. Scott, a 
Spender or a Garvin (whatever one may think of 
their judgment) stand out to remind us that writers 
like Charles Dickens and John Morley once adorned 
the purlieus of Fleet Street ; but to survey the 
region as a whole is regretfully to conclude that 
honesty and independence are now at a discount, 
and that the writer who wishes to place his pen at 
the service of what should be the honourable 
profession of journaHsm finds it hard to avoid 
trimming his sails, or even prostituting his integrity, 
at the bidding of some magnate for whom owning a 
group of newspapers is as irresponsible an amusement 
as owning a yacht or a grouse-moor. 



THE UPHEAVAL 55 

When such are the influences behind the scenes 
it is not surprising that the foreground should be 
little edifying, and more than a httle confusing, to 
the uninitiated private citizen. It is hardly too 
much to declare of the bulk of the daily Press of 
Europe to-day that to read it without some previous 
equipment of critical power, and of understanding 
of public affairs, is to darken counsel, and that as 
between a censored and a doctored sheet there is 
but little to choose. At any rate it is safe to say that 
those who happen to be aware of the proprietor of 
the paper, of his pohtical and social afliUations, his 
ambitions and enmities, and his relations to this or 
that group or influence in his own or other countries, 
will read far more in and between the Unes than the 
vast majority of the ingenuous public ! Take but 
a single instance. A fair proportion of readers may 
be gifted with some measure of critical judgment 
upon what they read, but it needs an unusual 
measure of discrimination to draw conclusions from 
what is passed over in silence. When the word is 
given that a man's name is never to be mentioned 
in any of a group of syndicated journals a power of 
excommunication is set in motion to which Rome 
at its zenith hardly attained. Such an edict may 
indeed never be issued ; the knowledge that it can 
be is in itself sufficient. It has served before now 
to provoke confidences and indiscretions which 
have altered the course of history. 

Thus by the outbreak of the war the Press had 
become increasingly commercialized, and had con- 
tributed sensibly to a debasement, a growing 
frivolity and irresponsibiUty, in men's attitude of 
mind towards public affairs. It is hardly necessary 



56 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

to recall the extent to which these influences were 
intensified, by the war. Clear and honest thinking 
is never so necessary, but also never so difficult, as 
in times of national passion and crisis ; and in this 
case the task was rendered, doubly difficult, both 
for journalist and citizen, by the emergence of 
official agencies of propaganda. When an ill- 
educated democracy is engaged in a life-and-death 
struggle in a cause as to which it is but imperfectly 
informed, it is perhaps unavoidable that systematic 
means should be taken to enUghten it. But the 
expedient is open to obvious abuse. When 
Governments begin to colour the Press and 
to tamper with the pubUshing trade, the re- 
actions are as unfortunate as they are subtle 
and incalculable ; and the end of the war found 
what Burke called the avenues to public opinion 
partly blocked up and pubUc opinion itself far less 
receptive, and considerably more cynical, than before 
the official publicity artists began their operations. 
It is out of this cynicism, and the critical process 
of which it is evidence, that improvement is 
ultimately to be looked for. It is idle to talk of 
" reforming " the Press. The philanthropists who 
buy up this or that sheet in order to boycott betting 
or divorce news or to boom the League of Nations 
are mistaking the symptom for the cause ; it is 
from the mind of the reader, not from the office 
end, that the change must come. It is the intel* 
lectual tradition of Scotland which causes a Scottish 
leading article to be better argued, on the average, 
than its EngUsh compeer, and it is the sincerity 
and public spirit of Lancashire which keeps the 
Manchester Guardian up to the mark. Not every 



THE UPHEAVAL 57 

district, in Britain or outside it, has the Press it 
deserves ; the particular combination of capital, 
enterprise, and public spirit which go to make up 
a great newspaper may not happen to be available. 
But the pubUc has nowhere a right to complain 
that the Press which serves it is beneath its needs, 
for it can always get rid of it by ceasing to use it. 
There are plenty of alternatives to the daily paper, 
both for the reader and the advertiser ; the book, 
the periodical, and the lecture are obvious examples. 
All that is needed to dethrone our modern infalhbles, 
if we are annoyed by their ubiquitous impertinence, 
is a Httle strength of mind on the part of their 
disillusioned purchasers. 

If the Press should supply the modern commimity 
with the circulating hfe-blood for its daily mental 
existence, the University should be its chief brain- 
centre, the seat of its most strenuous, persistent, 
and vital thinking. No modern man can hve 
without taking thought for the morrow ; fore- 
thought, the power to look ahead and see his life 
as a whole, and to frame plans and pohcies accord- 
ingly, is the mark of the civiUzed, as against the 
untutored and savage, human being. And what 
is true of the individual holds good also of the 
nation. Communities which Hve from hand to 
mouth, by the mere jostling and collision of in- 
numerable day by day impulses and interests, 
without any sense of design or purpose, or any 
consciousness of the need for a broader vision, 
cannot long maintain themselves in the modern 
age. Sooner or later, the tide will seize them, and 
they will drift to disaster. 



58 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

To meet this need for comprehensive and long- 
range intellectual effort, and for the sense of moral 
integrit}^ and elevation resulting from it, the Univer- 
sity is not only the most suitable, but practically 
the only available instrument. In the ancient 
world the stoa and the market-place, in the Middle 
Ages the monastery, might minister to the enquiring 
and reflective " mind " ; but the nature of modern 
life, and of its characteristic problems and interests, 
has turned the monastery, in so far as it still sur- 
vives, into a backwater, remote from the living issues 
of the day, while to imagine that serious tliinking 
is possible in the urge and bustle of a modern market- 
place, without an island of quiet to repair to for re- 
freshment and detachment, is to fall into the error 
of trying to serve God and Juggernaut at once. 
Whatever may be the other and more speciahzed 
functions of the University in the modern community 
— and it is not denied that, both in the field of 
general intellectual disciphne and of professional 
training it has indispensable work to do — it cannot 
be absolved from its pecuhar and responsible duty 
of ministering to the deeper spiritual and intellectual 
needs of the age, and of supplying quality and 
substance, mature reflection and the tonic of 
steadying and sympathetic criticism, to its ideals 
and aspirations. It is in this and no mere orna- 
mental sense of the word that Universities can and 
ought to be regarded as homes and radiating centres 
of culture. 

Such was the work performed and the influence 
exerted by Universities in the heyday of their power 
and greatness, when students, young and old alike, 
repaired to Paris and Prague and Oxford as sources 



THE UPHEAVAL 59 

of living knowledge and inspiration. And such, if 
in lesser measure, owing partly to the competition 
of the printed with the spoken word, was the in- 
fluence of the continental, and not least of the 
German Universities, during a large part of the 
nineteenth century. At a time when Newman was 
proclaiming to deaf ears his immortal Idea of a 
University, and when Oxford was instituting com- 
petitive examinations as a much needed improve- 
ment upon old-fashioned systems of patronage, 
Matthew Arnold could point to Germany as the 
chief standard-bearer of spiritual freedom in its 
struggle against the debasing influences of the age. 
" What I admire in Germany," he wrote, after his 
visit there in 1865, " is that while there too in- 
dustrialism, that great modern power, is making at 
Berlin, and Leipzig, and Elberfeld, the most success- 
ful and rapid progress, the idea of culture, culture 
of the only true sort, is in Germany a living power 
also. Petty towns have a University whose teaching 
is famous throughout Europe ; and the King of 
Prussia and Count Bismarck resist the loss of a 
great savant from Prussia as they would resist a 
political check. If true culture ever becomes a 
civilizing power in the world, and is not overlaid 
by fanaticism, by industrialism, or by frivolous 
pleasure-seeking, it will be to the faith and zeal of 
this homely and much-ridiculed German people that 
the great result will be mainly owing," 

During the half-century which has elapsed since 
these words were written the European University, 
and with it the European ideal and standard of 
culture, has suffered a decline comparable, in its own 
sphere of activity and temptation, to that of the 



6o EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

Press. If it has not yet, or only in small measure, 
become commercialized, it has succumbed to a 
characteristic and subtle form of industriahzation. 
It has become the victim of that division of labour, 
that specialization, upon which Adam Smith fixed 
as the distinguishing mark of the modern age. 
Where fifty years ago the University, if ministering, 
in some countries at any rate (though not in Ger- 
many) to an unduly restricted range of students, sent 
forth into the life of the community men who had 
acquired the power to think for themselves and to let 
their minds play truly on the great enduring interests 
of human life and society, to-day their tendency is 
more and more to produce a manufactured and hall- 
marked article, designed to fill a particular niche 
in some organized scheme or system. The old 
University course, with its wide and infectious 
appeal, its ideal of the universitas or studium generate, 
the unity and integration of human knowledge, has 
been dissipated and departmentalized by the intru- 
sion of one favoured subject after another to a posi- 
tion of equahty with the more general human studies 
and interests, while the scholar or teacher himself, 
instead of being a " master " of the old style, ahve 
to all the issues and interests and imphcations of 
some noble and wide-ranging area of man's learning 
and achievement, is too often just a laborious hack, 
who has drudged himself into a doctorate by some 
conscientious compilation of other men's thoughts — 
a mere piece of dead and unresponsive stone in a 
vast cold mosaic of " research " of which it is left to 
posterity to discover the pattern and assess the 
value. When it is claimed, for our present-day 
academies, that they have discovered how to apply 



THE UPHEAVAL 6i 

scientific method to this or that branch of human 
enquiry, too often all that is meant is that they 
have developed some mechanical scheme for putting 
live knowledge into cold storage, in the vain beUef 
that " facts," set out and documented in a learned 
pubhcation, will emerge some day of their own power 
as fresh and rosy as frozen apples from the Antipodes. 
The modern world has, in fact, discovered how to 
organize factories and syndicates of knowledge, and 
how to use students, and even graduates, as mere 
labourers and helots without either the abiUties or 
the opportunity for promotion to a worthier situa- 
tion. There is many an untutored peasant and 
workman, a shepherd out on the hills or a cobbler 
or tailor at his bench, whose trained intelligence 
and all-round knowledge, interests, and even 
refinement, would bear favourable comparison 
with the helpless and ill-starred victims of academic 
industrialization . 

If it be asked whence this debasement and perver- 
sion of University ideals and methods has proceeded, 
candour must needs reply that it is Germany who 
has set the example and forced the pace. The last 
half-century has witnessed in Germany an intellec- 
tual transformation, a change in outlook and values 
and quahty, such as her admirers in Victorian 
England could not have been expected to anticipate ; 
for the yielding plasticity of the German mind — its 
sensitiveness and impressionabiUty to external 
conditions and compulsions — is too remote from 
stolid British habits for an EngUshman easily to 
conceive. The fact, however, remains that the 
" culture " of which the world heard so much in 
1 914 was something wholly different from the 



62 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

" ciWlizing power." and the sincoro. ardent, and 
almost relii;ious service of truth and freedom which 
cliaracteri/ed the dermanv of 1S04. Pmiui; the 
last (WO generations Germany has been Uviug on 
the reputation of hex Victorian giants— for giants 
they were — and of those of their pupils and 
descendants who ha\e iuhejited their spirit and 
tradition. ^Meanwhile, culture had become more 
and more an annex of the German, and especially 
(owing to the increasing attracti\eness of the 
metropolis) of the IVussivUi. state, and. mider the 
i^gis of a vigilant and autocratic go\ernment, 
freedom of thought and integrity of soul declined. 
Culture, in its most limited and mechanical sense, 
became an article of exportation and advertisement, 
and the young and aspiring I'niversities of Central 
and Eastern Europe, and even of France, Italy. 
Britain, and America, have been touched and 
taitued by its arrogant and dcvitah.'ing intluence. 
How deadening to the moral sense, and at the same 
time how superticially impressive and plausible, 
this intluence has been can best be realized by 
anyone who, like the present writer, has had occasion 
to read a great anunmt of what was written by 
German philosophers, historians, and economists on 
the war. and to observe the way in which, not only 
the smaller fry, but men with ICuropean names, such 
as Lamprecht and liduard Meyer, Troeltsch and 
Eucken and Kerschensteiner, not merely allowed 
their patriotic feelings to run away with them — this 
is but a human weakness, pardonable even in a 
professor — but sought to readjust their IWIfju- 
scJuiuung, their whole philosophy and scheme of 
values, in order to bring it into conformity with a 



THE UPHEAVAL 63 

government as to whose conduct and motives they 
were content to be left in the dark. The bankruptcy 
of the pre-war regime in Germany touches far more 
than its statesmanship. It is the debacle of the 
whole system of specialization of which the entrust- 
ing by the patient and credulous German people of 
its political interests to experts is but a single 
example. The nation which allowed itself to be 
governed by a bumptious dilettante hke the Kaiser, 
aided by bureaucrats who had trained themselves 
to make the best sense they could out of his whims, 
was content also to draw its general ideas, in the 
deficiency of real intellectual leadership and insight, 
from pamphleteers and pseudo-philosophers who had 
mastered the easy art of manipulating abstract 
terms. In the event, the German people is faced 
with a mass of debris — pohtical, intellectual, and 
social — even vaster than it as yet suspects, and the 
world of her neighbours and former admirers, which 
was suffering, if in milder form, from a similar 
sapping of its intellectual integrity and a similar 
absence of leadership and initiative in its brain- 
centres, is gradually becoming conscious of the full 
extent of the upheaval in prestige and influence, as 
in methods, quality, and values, entailed by the 
events of the last seven years. The old universitas 
of European culture will not be rebuilt in a day ; 
but it is time for the new generation of students to 
realize the task which awaits them if European 
civilization is to survive. 

In a survey of the intellectual influences of our 
time it would be discourteous to omit the Christian 
Churches, for they represent the oldest organized 



64 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

teaching institutions in the community, and they 
still retain a large measure of power over the minds 
of men and women. 

Europe is still considered, in common parlance, 
as a Christian continent, and it is on this assumption 
— to preach a religion and a waj^ of life of which 
Europe is regarded as haWng been for some sixteen 
centuries the authoritative home and centre — that 
European missionaries are maintained throughout 
other parts of the globe. It may be doubted, 
however, whether, in any real or deep sense, 
European society, or any considerable proportion 
of European men and women, in any one of the 
seventy generations which have elapsed since 
Christianity became the official religion of the 
Roman Empire, has ever accepted, or even 
endeavoured to understand and apply, the teaching 
and outlook of its Founder. There has indeed 
never been a generation without Christians, but 
their intiuence on public affairs has been hmited 
and intermittent, and often very wrong-headed in 
apphcation, so that the good that a Bede and an 
Anselm, a Hus and a \\'icHf, a St. Francis, 
a Savonarola, and a Father Damien have done in 
the name of their common Master, has been more 
than outweighed by the wars and the persecutions, 
the crimes of intolerance and ambition, the worldly 
vanity and hardness, of those who acted, and had 
the power to command others to act, in the same 
name. The long history of European Christianity, 
if it ever comes to be written, wiU be the history 
of a submerged and hidden movement — the tracing 
of the course of a pine but tenuous stream of living 
water which has refreshed the souls of innumerable 



THE UPHEAVAL 65 

men and women who have penetrated to its secret 
recesses, but has but seldom emerged into the 
open, to flow through the broad and dusty cities 
where the world's main activities are carried on. 

However that may be, in the present age, at any 
rate, the so-called Christian Churches are but 
little representative of the true Christian spirit, 
and their influence and work, both on its intellectual 
and more purely spiritual side, has been affected, 
as was inevitable, by the material and vulgarizing 
forces of the age. There has, indeed, in the Europe 
of the last few decades, been a perceptible increase 
of interest in the problems and the experience of 
the religious life. Thanks mainly to the spread of 
popular education, men and women are everywhere 
seeking to rid themselves of shams and shibboleths, 
and to find guidance and inspiration in the search 
for the abiding realities of human fate and existence. 
But not merely do the Churches, almost without 
exception, stand aloof from their endeavours, but 
they are in general the most serious and discouraging 
obstacle in the path of the seeker after truth. 
What more ironical spectacle can be imagined than 
that, at a time when earnest minds are everywhere 
bewildered by the difficulty of harmonizing the 
laws and processes of the visible and the invisible 
realms of reality, when the discord between rehgion 
and science, faith and knowledge, must be resolved, 
and resolved quickly, if mankind is to be saved 
from a rending in twain of its inner life, greater 
than any of the mere external schisms which have 
taken place in earlier ages, the collected rehgious 
dignitaries of the English-speaking world, number- 
ing some three hundred and fifty bishops, should 

Ee 



66 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

have passed a sponge over this whole discussion 
by merely reiterating a set of formulae, antiquated 
in expression, if not in meaning, drawn up 
at a similar conference in Asia Minor sixteen 
centuries ago ; or that, with Europe materially 
and spiritually in chaos, the successor of the 
fisherman at the Vatican should be concerning 
himself, purely for reasons of material policy, 
with the renewal of diplomatic relations with 
France, with the safeguarding of his organization, 
and the continuance of a celibate priesthood, 
in the land of John Hus, and with the preservation 
of the Moslem power at Constantinople and in 
Nearer Asia, in order to neutrahze the progress 
made by a great sister organization of Christians ? 
Is it too much to say, in the face of all this, that it 
is the organized Churches, and the habit of mind 
they foster — or, rather, fossilize — which stand chiefly 
in the way of the religious revival that has so often 
been predicted and so often postponed ? If by a 
miracle the existing religious organizations could 
be dissolved and their endowments not distributed 
but obhterated, what opportunities would be opened 
out and what energies released for the rehgious 
aspirations of modern men and for the devising of 
better means for their satisfaction ! 

" It is the letter which killeth and the spirit which 
maketh alive." In the modern age the analogue 
to the letter, and its jealous guardian, is the organiza- 
tion. Religion is imprisoned by its professional 
keepers. And this has become as true of the 
Protestant Churches, which owe their origin to a 
great movement of spiritual liberation, of protest, 
not merely against the abuses, but against the 



THE UPHEAVAL 67 

fact itself of religious organization, as of their 
Catholic and Orthodox colleagues. The hardening 
of Catholicism into a system where, for all the 
beauty of its ritual and the majesty of its traditional 
appeal, for all the spacious liberty allowed in 
non-essentials, the believer is committed to the 
surrender of his spiritual freedom and initiative, 
is a problem and a spectacle with which European 
minds have been famihar for many centuries. But 
the similar hardening of the Protestant Churches, 
who can neither claim so imposing an ancestry nor 
rival Rome in its outward graces, is a fact of the 
last few generations ; and it is due to the stealthy 
pressure of material cares, to the silently growing 
power of organization and system, to the pre- 
dominance of the Marthas over the Maries. If 
neither in France nor in Germany, neither in Holland 
nor Hungary nor Switzerland, nor among the Free 
Churches of Britain, a power of intellectual and 
spiritual leadership is to be discerned, the main 
cause is that the Churches have become accustomed 
to regard themselves, according to the gospel, not 
of their Master, but of the Guild-Socialists, as 
professional organizations, and that, in the 
atmosphere of endowment controversies and MilHon 
Guinea funds, and of the worldly intrigues and 
entanglements which these involve, deeper interests 
are lost sight of. " He that seeketh to save his 
soul shall lose it " is as true of the life of organizations 
as of the individual. In spite, if not because, of 
the fifty years' struggle of the Church of England to 
preserve its schools the ex-Church school scholars who 
fought in France were found by the chaplains to 
be as ignorant of the faith, and as indifferent to 



68 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

their ministrations, as their more reputedly godless 
comrades ; nor do the efforts of the Free Churches 
to arrest the decline in the statistics of their Sunday 
school scholars and Church members absolve them 
from the duty of attending to the task for which 
they were founded. The war has often been 
described as proof of the impotence of the Christian 
Churches. It would be truer to say that modern 
life as a whole is a demonstration that neither the 
world nor the churches have even attempted to 
be Christian. But the war has certainly set this, 
the greatest and most baffling of all our problems, 
in a new and glaring light, and made it more urgent 
than ever for all good Europeans to apply their 
minds to its solution. 



PART II 

THE SETTLEMENT 

There is no bilierer pain than to have much knowledge 
and no power. — Herodotus. 



INTRODUCTORY 

The events which now fall briefly to be described 
have, in their sadness and in their irony, hardly, if 
ever, been equalled in the long history of mankind. 
A whole continent, worn out by effort and suffering, 
by suspense and privation, looked to three men, in 
whom the concentrated organization of a modern 
war and the chances of poHtics had vested supreme 
power over its destinies, to bring it lasting justice 
and appeasement. They failed it. The gifts which 
had made of the one a great teacher and preacher, of 
the second a great energizer, and of the third the 
heroic veteran of a desperate hour, were not the gifts 
for which Europe called. Ignorant of their hmita- 
tions, they essayed a task with which Fate, perhaps 
in mercy, had forbidden a Lincoln and a 
Cavour, each on a lesser stage, to grapple. While 
they fumbled with the tiller of the ship of Europe's 
fortunes it seemed, to one onlooker at least, as 
though the devil himself were seizing it from their 
hands. 

" The first six months after the armistice," re- 
marked a high French authority recently, " put 
Europe back a hundred years." It is still in our 
power to make this an over-statement, but it sums 
up the impression made by the course of events on 
the minds of the host of subsidiary actors who were 
powerless to change the course of the plot. Every- 
thing went wrong, from the first call for negotiations 
in October until the final rejection of the Treaties 
by the United States Senate. 

71 



72 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

The story opens at the end of September, 1918, 
but in order to grasp its full significance a short 
retrospect is necessary. 



CHAPTER I 

AUGUST, I914-SEPTEMBER, I918 

The record must, from the nature of the situation, 
be written, strategically speaking, from the view- 
point of the land-power ; for, whether it be regarded 
as " imprisoned," or as holding the interior lines, 
it was driven as inevitably to take the initiative as 
the sea-power was driven, however reluctantly, to 
a war of attrition. 

The German General Staff, working on Schlieffen's 
plans for the invasion of France through Belgium, 
attempted to secure a quick decision " before the 
leaves fell," and before the blockade became effective. 
But the German machine was stopped, and then 
rolled back, by French valour, skill, and alertness, 
reinforced, if as yet but in small measure, by British 
tenacity. The Marne was the decisive battle of the 
war. Henceforward cool heads knew, what 
Rathenau and others had feared, that the struggle 
must be long, that time was on the side of sea-power, 
and that to conquer whole kingdoms was not a sure 
road to victory. Nevertheless, the annexation of 
fresh territories on the Continent would bring both 
supplies and prestige. When the Allies had broken 
the attack on the Iser Tirpitz bethought him, too 
late, of the possibihties of the submarine, but the 
soldiers looked eastward. Their choice lay between 



THE SETTLEMENT 73 

the north-east, with the possible rout and elimination 
of Russia, and the south-east, where lay the Danube 
waterway and the road to Turkey. Helfferich, with 
his eye on Roumanian grain and oil, advised 
the one. Falkenhayn, who had taken Moltke's 
place after the Mame, chose the other. Although 
Turkey had now come into the war, she must wait 
as yet for her munitions. 

It was a precious interval for the Entente. If 
Greece would co-operate, Serbia would be reUeved, 
Bulgaria intimidated or won over, and the Dardanelles 
opened by a rapid stroke. King Constantine in- 
tervened with an unconstitutional veto ; the Turks, 
who had warning, were able to strengthen their 
defences ; the British failed to push home their 
naval attack, and, when their land-forces arrived 
five months later, could gain but painful inches of 
ground. The surprise landing at Suvla promised 
better fortune, and there are men still living who 
looked down from the crest above upon the inner 
waters widening to Gallipoli. But there was a delay 
in the operation. Turkish reinforcements arrived, 
the attempt was abandoned, and the evacuation 
followed. The blunder of a commander, or of a 
subordinate, had prevented the sea-power from 
piercing the one open joint in the land-power's 
armour. The Black Sea, and the great Russian world 
behind it, remained cut off from the ocean. The 
result was three more years of war and the Russian 
revolution ! So many ills could a failure of judgment 
in one poor mortal bring upon a continent and upon 
mankind ! 

Meanwhile, despite the intervention of Italy, 
German arms were pressing eastward. By the 



74 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

autumn of 1915, after Suvla and the occupation of 
^^'a^sa^v and Kovno, Falkenhayn was free to turn 
south. Bulgaria, after disposing of her harvest, 
joined the Germans in overrunning Serbia. The 
remnant of a heroic army made its way across 
Albania to Durazzo, and, eventually, to Corfu. It 
was a second and almost more terrible Kossovo, but 
the more quickly to be retrieved. German prestige 
was at its zenith, but victory was no nearer. 
Roumania remained neutral. 

Falkenlia\'n decided to cripple France before 
Britain's new army could take the field. For four 
months he hammered at Verdun. The poilu did not 
let him pass, and on July i, 1916, Kitchener's Army 
struck on the Somme, the first battle in which tanks, 
omen of a coming superiority of offence over defence, 
at least on the land, took their ungainly part. \i 
the end of August Roumania threw in her lot 
with the AUies, and rashly invaded Transylvania. 
Falkenhayn gave place to Hindenburg and Luden- 
dorff, who circumvented the Roumanians by a rapid 
adv^ance on the Danube. Bucharest was occupied 
in December. Helfferich was assured of his supplies 
The winter of 191 6-1 91 7 was indeed to be terrible, 
but, so far as food was concerned, the immediate 
anxiety was removed. 

The land-power now seemed more triumphant 
than ever. After its many \dctories all it needed 
was finality. Within a few days of the occupation 
of Bucharest the Kaiser and his three nominal 
associates made a grandiloquent offer of peace. A 
few days later President \\'ilson, whose intended 
intervention had been delayed, first by the Lille 
deportations and then by the Presidential election. 



THE SETTLEMENT 75 

issued a note to Iho belligerents asking tliem to 
stale their war-aims, and recommending " peace 
without victory." But before his action could 
mature, Ludendorff, aided by strong popular forces 
in Germany, had converted the Kaiser to the policy 
of using the submarine to the limit. The German 
people, who were living largely on swedes, were 
prei)ared to stake all on a single throw to end the 
war. In vain Ilelfferich argued that America would 
intervene, and would save, and send Britain, more 
additional food than the submarine would sink. He 
saw Hoover in a vision; had he shown him in 
person it is doubtful whether he would have con- 
vinced men like Ludendorff and the Kaiser, whose 
minds moved in the old miUtary grooves. But he 
miglit have secured a six weeks' respite — the six 
weeks which, as the event proved, sealed the doom 
of the German power. On March 12 came the 
Russian Revolution. It meant, as Bedin at least 
could realize, the end of the Russian resistance. 
With the Eastern front eliminated, with America still 
neutral, and with the resulting moral and financial 
situation, the war might well have been won. But 
it was too late now to capitulate to Washington. 

The Russian disintegration, coinciding with the 
failure of General Nivelle's offensive in France, 
reUeved the military but embarrassed the political 
situation. In April Count Czernin, now Foreign 
Minister for the young Emperor Karl, reported that 
the Dual Monarchy could not face another winter's 
fighting. When Ludendorff would not listen to 
him he appealed to Erzberger. One result was a 
confused political crisis in Germany in July, the 
fall of Bethmann-Hollweg, and the passing of a 



76 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

moderate wax-aims resolution by the Reichstag, 
which the new Chancellor, IMichaelis, claimed the 
right to interpret as he thought lit. Another was 
the Stockholm Sociahst conference, wisely boycotted 
by the governments of France, Ital}^ and, in the 
face of a naive opposition, Britain. 

]\Ieanwhile the submarine, which looked, for some 
weeks in the spring, as if it had found the heel of the 
oceanic Achilles, was discovering the limitations of 
its power. Its object was defeated, but only just 
defeated, by the convoy system, and by the perfec- 
tion of the inter-allied shipping organization. Peace 
seemed further off than ever. True, the Eastern 
army was now available. Ne\-ertheless, man-power 
was running short, and the American military 
strength, if, as was to be feared, it could be trans- 
ported to Europe, was limitless. Best strike soon 
and hard to break the opposing morale. It was the 
only road to victory still open to the land-power. 

Italy had been weakened by Socialist and Catholic 
propaganda. Ludendorff selected her for the lirst 
blow. It would carry Austria-Hungary through 
the winter, and the news of the Germans in Venice 
and Verona might even end the war. Caporetto 
followed ; but its result was to make, not to break, 
the morale at which the stroke was aimed. The 
attack was stayed on the Piave, but its impact was 
felt, not only in Italy, but in certain English country 
houses. Early in December, Lord Lansdowne 
wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph which seemed 
to show that British morale was at last really 
weakening. Ludendorff, no doubt over-estimating 
the signiticance of the new alliance between a small 
Conservative and a small " Labour" clique, decided 



THE SETTLEMENT 77 

to strike at Britain. The offensive launched on 
March 21 was the result. It found the AlUes 
unready. For though, with characteristic insight, 
Mr. Lloyd George had read in Caporetto the lesson 
of a unified AlUed command, long since demanded 
by the French, lie withdrew the suggestion, with 
a promptitude equally characteristic, when it 
encountered obstacles in the House of Commons. 
It was not till March 26, at DouUens, in a gloomy 
hour, that, on the initiative of Lord Milner, General 
Foch was set in supreme command of the Allied forces. 
The last great German effort for victory was 
doomed to failure within a few weeks. Ludendorff 
has stated that it was not until after August 8 
that he realized that the AUied counter-attack 
could not be stayed, and that power was slipping 
from his grasp. His nimbler colleague Kiihlmann 
saw it many weeks sooner, and on June 24 he 
informed the Reichstag that he saw no prospect 
of an early victory. By July 31, the beginning of 
the fifth war-year, the Frankfurter Zeitung was at 
last admitting that Germany would have to face 
the whole force of America ; in other words, that 
the submarine must be discounted, and that the 
war could not be won. But the soldiers would not, 
and the politicians could not, face the facts of a 
desperate situation. The one practical suggestion 
— that Germany should make common cause with 
the anti-Bolsheviks, and retrieve in the East what 
she was losing in the West and overseas — made by 
Helfferich after his brief visit to Moscow in August, 
was spurned by the vacillating directors of German 
policy. They preferred instead to supplement the 
Brest-Litovsk Treaty by a commercial agreement, 



78 EUROrE IN CONVALESCENCE 

concluded with m\ envoy whose real nussion 
was to pave the way for a Gennan Revolution. 
So through Aui^iist and September events which 
were the prelude to catastrophe took their coiu-se 
in the West, on the RaNc. in Salonika, and in 
Allenbj-'s headquarters in Palestine. 



CHAPTER TI 

SEPTEMBER J9-NOVEMBER II, I91S 

Ox September jo the storm broke. The bolt tell, 
as in 1014. in the Balkans. The long train of events 
which had been laid at Sarajevo culminated in the 
valley of the Wudar. Bulgaria submitted to the 
AlUes in an armistice. King Eerdinand lied. 
Allied troops were free to enter his capital ;uid to 
mo\e northwards to Buda-Pesth, or eastwards to 
Constantinople, as they might wish. 

The news was followed inunediatel\- at BerUn 
by the resignation of Count liertHng and the appoint- 
ment of Prince Max \on Baden as German 
Clumcellor, with control o\er the mihtary power. 
The defection of Bulgaria from what was called 
the Quadruple Alliance, but was. in effect, a military 
empire, me.uit, for ;myone in either cimip who 
had eyes to see. the end of the war ; for it was the 
end of that Prussian miUtarism against which, as 
the world had been told a thous;uid times, the war 
was being made. " This is the greatest day in 
British history since ^^"aterloo." remarked a leading 
British otVicial to the present writer when the news 
arrived. The incubus which had lain heavy on 



THE SF.TTLEMENT 79 

Europe for fifty years was removed. Tlic frontiers 
of the (lerman doniinioii liad slinink in a day, as 
tJie (ierman JVess was adniitlinf(, from Nazareth 
and Uskiib and Kovno to Passaii and Memel. 
" Mitteleuropa " had passed into history, or rather 
into romance;. All that remained was to press home 
the victory and to perfect the schemes, already well 
on foot, for the political and economic settlement 
of Europe. Those with inside knowledge reckoned 
that fighting might go on for another six weeks, 
and, to give precision to his estimate, November 10 
was hazarded by one of them as the date of the 
close of hostilities. It has frequently been stated 
since that the events of October and November, 
the collapse of the (ierman resistance, took the 
world by surprise. This ma.y have been true of 
the public, of the soldiers, who naturally could 
not see how hollow the iron sludl of military organiza- 
tion they still saw in front of them had become, 
and of some of the more slapdash politicians ; it 
was not true of those whose business it was to advise 
them from the fullest attainable knowledge of the 
facts. l£very careful student of Clermany knew 
that, when the German morale yielded, it would 
collapse utterly and at once ; and even those who 
knew too little of Germany to have been on the 
look-out for this beforehand could have read it 
for themselves in the German Press. It would, 
perhaps, be well to give one reference. Professor 
Delbnick's war-diary for September, 1918, published 
in the Preussische Jahrbucher for October, is a tragic 
and almost classical instance of the way in which 
the German mind reacts to outer circumstance, 
and hastens to readapt its whole philosophy of life 



So EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

and history accordingly. Within a day of the 
Bulgarian collapse he had admitted the bankruptcy 
of the Mdchtpolitik, which he had been upholding 
and teaching throughout his long career, and was 
turning his mind seriously and respectfully to 
Anglo-Saxon political ideas and to the possibilities 
of a League of Nations. 

Let us briefly recall the situation with which the 
Allied statesmen were faced in October, iqi8. 

The world, as we have seen, was divided into two 
great systems of economic organization, the one 
oceanic, and in control of the world's chief sources of 
industrial raw material and of food-supply, the 
other lunopean. The Ocean had now detinitely 
defeated the Continent ; the besiegers had won the 
day. With the collapse of the German military 
power and its supersession by civil governments, 
now no longer Ave, but (counting the Baltic states) 
likely to become well-nigh a dozen in Europe alone, 
the organization which, like a steel corset, had held 
Europe together for the last four ^-ears, which had 
provided employment, transport, food, and hnance 
for its hard-ridden populations, was destined to 
disappear. Europe, " from the Rhine to the Volga," 
to quote from a memorandum written at the time, 
was in solution. It was not a question now of auto- 
cratic as against popular government ; it \\'as a 
question of government against anarchy. From one 
moment to the ne.xt every responsible student of 
public affairs, outside the ranks of the professed 
revolutionaries, however red his previous afliliations 
may have been, was turned perforce into a Conser- 
vative. The one urgent question was to get Europe 
back to work. 



THE SETTLEMENT 8i 

This involved innumerable difficulties of detail. 
The chief, perhaps, was the problem of demobiliza- 
tion. How was the German army, consisting in 
large part of industrial workers, to be demobilized 
into a society which was as yet wholly unable to 
absorb them ? The Austro-Hungarian army was 
faced with an even more urgent problem. It could 
not be demobilized because there was no authority to 
send it home. The collapse of the Dual Monarchy 
involved the vanishing of the War Office. In the 
event, the men mostly found their way home them- 
selves, not without violence and larceny. The first 
War Minister of the new Austrian Republic, a 
Socialist, Dr. Julius Deutsch, has written an in- 
teresting account of how he took up his quarters in 
the old Habsburg War Ministry, and set to work 
manfully to bring order out of chaos. Noske, the 
German Majority Socialist, has written a similar 
story of his experience as first War Minister of the 
German RepubUc. Others no doubt could tell the 
same tale for Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Jugo-Slavia, 
and Roumania. But behind all these and other 
detailed problems was the master-question of setting 
the wheels of production — of normal production for 
peace purposes — revolving once more. 

It was a vast and menacing, but not wholly im- 
practicable, task, for men's minds were ripe for its 
solution. Never was public opinion so plastic, so 
ready to respond to a lead, so eagerly expectant, as 
during those weeks or months. The Allied govern- 
ments had thrown propaganda like bread upon the 
waters, and it was coming back after many days in 
the shape of a pathetic and unreasoning confidence 
in the integrity, the goodness, the unselfishness, and 

Fe 



S2 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

the practical energy of the AlUed — and especially 
the English-speaking — governments. The long- 
submerged stream of Liberal ideaUsm welled up 
suddenly to the surface, and, for the time at least, 
it swept all before it. Reason, feeling, and, in the 
case of the enemy peoples at any rate, a strong dash 
of self-interest, made the spokesman of the Allies 
the hero of the da\'. Faced with the bankruptcy of 
the old authority, and not habituated as yet to the 
new, simple men and women throughout the 
blockaded area looked vaguely to some super- 
national government, to the much-advertised 
League of Nations, to help them through the crisis. 
Nor was their confidence so foolish or ill-placed as 
it seems now to many of them after the event. It 
is true that the League of Nations existed as yet 
only in the imagination of its author, and that, even 
when it assumed concrete shape, it was not a super- 
national government, and exercised no control over 
raw materials and food supphes. But in October, 
191S, a super-government, or something very Hke 
it, was actually in existence, and plans had been 
made, and could have been put into effect without 
surpassing difiiculty, for meeting the very problems 
which men looked to the League of Nations to solve. 
The oceanic, like the continental system, had per- 
fected its economic organization. In October, 1918, 
it stood, compact and victorious, at the zenith of 
its efficiency. Inter-Allied Committees, working 
under the authority of the Supreme ^^'ar Council, 
were exercising a control over the whole, or the 
greater part, of the extra-continental supphes of 
wheat, sugar, meats and fats, oil and oilseeds, 
copper, tin, nitrate of soda, rubber, wool, cotton. 



THE SETTLEMENT 83 

jute, hemp and flax, leather, timber, coal, paper, 
petroleum, and tobacco, together with nearly all the 
Allied, and a large block of neutral shipping, which, 
owing to the submarine, was the narrow neck of 
the bottle regulating the volume and destination of 
every sea-borne commodity. What expedient could 
be more practical, and indeed more logical, than 
that the victorious system should recognize its 
responsibihty towards the tasks of its defeated rival, 
annex, as it were, the continental area to its domain, 
and so once more reknit the economic unity which 
the war had sundered ? And what happier means 
could be devised for the promotion of the ideal of 
international co-operation of which the League of 
Nations was to be the lasting embodiment ? It is 
not given to peoples, except for the briefest of spells, 
to live by faith alone. Europe indeed had a visible 
demonstration of the spirit and methods of the new 
order which had been preached from Washington. 
By their handhng of the urgent problem of Europe's 
economic need the President and his message would 
be judged. 

We can now take up once more the thread of 
events. 

In the fust week of October the new German 
Government, as was expected, decided to abandon 
the German war-aims en bloc, and to accede to those 
of the Allies. The natural mode of doing so would 
have been to approach the Supreme War Council 
or the Allied governments individually, with a 
request for negotiations upon the terms and 
principles so repeatedly proclaimed by their states- 
men. But, with a clumsy attempt at astuteness, 
which proved, in the event, to be the height of folly, 



S4 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

insto.ul of .^ppuwohiui; tho Allies as a whole with 
a ix^qiiost for poaco. the Cionnan Gi>vcrnn\ont 
appi\x\chod Piesideut Wilson alone with a reqtiest 
for an annistioe. Its motive in approaching 
Pivsident Wilson was plain enongh. Notwith- 
standing the general aoeeptanoe of his ideas and 
pi^lioy by the Allied statesmen, notably by Mr. 
Llo\d George in a s\veoh to the American trooi"»s in 
the snmmer. the l^x^sident's own statemeiits had 
been moie explicit, especially on the all-ini]\>rtant 
economic issue, than those of any of his confederates. 
The third of his Fourteen Points stipulated for 
" equality of trade conditions " lvtweei\ the parties 
to the peace, and only a few da\*s Ix'fore, on Septem- 
ber 27, he had made a spivch in strong condenmation 
of " seltish economic leagues." of which the oceanic 
combii\ation. in Cievmat\ eyes, was a [X">tenti;U 
embodiment, ^loixwer. the President had nowhere 
in his spcvches laid particular stress on the repar.\tion 
due by the aggn^ssors in the war for the damage 
caused by their invasion of .\llied territory. It 
might, therefore, seem to a Cuninan statesman, faced 
with a choice of methods of surrender, that blotter 
terms might be secured fron\ the President than 
from Pritain, Fmnce, and Italy. After all. the 
Pivsidetit s original ambition. onl\- frustrated b\- 
the declaration of the unlimited submarine war less 
than two years Ivfoie. had Wen to act as a mediator. 
Why should he not once more assvnne the same r6le ? 
Nevertheless the choice of the lV\sident ]M\>\-ed a 
grave bhmder. for the Wootirow Wilson of Octolvr, 
IQ18, was no longer the man of Pecember. lOiO ; 
still less was the American ]niblic the same as it 
was Ix^ore the wave of enthusiasm and of sustained 



TITE SETTLEMENT 85 

(^rioil :iii(l «'X|)('c,la(i()ii wlii( li li;i(l lollovvi <l Aiiici ic.a's 
cnlry iiilo llic, w;ir. Moicovci , il iiidicittcd u disli list 
of lilt: Alli(:(l s(;il(!sincii .'lud iJicir peoples whi< Ij 
auju^ured dl for (lie luhiie. 

vSlill moK; disasli'oiis was tlu; (hrcision (o ask for 
an ariiiisli( (;. 'I'lie n^cpicsl was indeed niado 
COnliaiy lo IIk; hellei' jild/^'llieiil ol jlie CiiailCcUor. 
I( was dm; lo tlie iiisisleiice of LiideiidorJf, wlio 
tlioii/.;ld liiiiisi'lf faced in the early days of October 
will] an innnin«;nt military (l('jbacle in the West, 
and wished at all c.osls lo sav(; Ihe re{Milalion of 
tlu! sysleni which he enihodied for rcas(jns which 
have heconic more ap|)aiciH in Mm; recent duvelop- 
nienls of (i(;rina,n politics. Willi d(;j»loia,l)le wea,k- 
nuss the ChaiK cllor allowed himself to be overruled. 
In the <;ven(, il was some forty days before the 
armistice wa.s secured time eiKMif^h for Ihe expected 
d<''b.icle to have occurred, or, alternatively, for a 
preliminary peace to have been nej:,'otiated. In Hie 
interval the iMeld-Marshal realized Ihat he had lost 
his nerve and had exagf,'erated the imminence of 
what remained, indeed, a real peril, liut by that time 
his government was W(;ll launched on Ihe wnjug track. 

It had iiev(;r b(;en ex];ected that the war would 
(;nd in an armistice. An armistice signifies a 
temporary cessation of lighting, under conditions 
allowing for its resumplion should neg(jtiations 
break down -as happened, foi- instance, between 
tlie lialkan league a.nd Hie Tinks in Kjij. It was 
obvious llial Ihe indiishial develoj)ments of modern 
warfare ma.de such a. |)ro((;din(; impossible in this 
case. Tlu; vast stream oi mmiilions and of the 
other elements of war-production could no more 
be turned off and on again from one day t(j the next 



S6 EUROPE IX CONVALESCENCE 

than a Niagara. If WvVr-production, together with 
the myriad .uTvingenients depetuient upon it. ceased, 
it \vould be well-iiigh impossible to resume it. If 
it continued, the iron stuwin would accumulate 
until it rapidly overtlowed all possible means for 
containing it. Any cessation of hostilities, then, 
by whatever name it were called, must, for strictly 
practical reasons, be tinal. It had. therefore, been 
expected that the war would end with the conclusion 
ot a prelimiUvixy peace, brought about, as in 1S14 
and 1S71. ;ifter a few weeks" negotiation during the 
actual continuance of hostilities, and hastened by 
the desire on both sides to save life. When Germany, 
however, contrary to these pivcedents. asked tirst 
for im armistice, she forced the Allies to draw up 
terms so stringent as to render her rosmnption of 
hostihties impossible. It was for this reason that 
the conditions drawn up by the Allied miUtary 
and nav.il authorities involved extensive measures 
of military dis..\rmament and occupation, and 
the continuance of the blockade, which was then 
actUiUly, as it still is potentially, the most powerful 
instrument of control over the miUtary system of 
Germany. In this connection it should be remem- 
bered that it was not till November -:q that the 
Gernivin submarines operating in the Mediterranean 
returned to their home ports. The ;\rmistice may 
have contributed somewhat, in unimaginati\e eyes, 
to save the prestige of the Germ;ui iumy. if not of 
the German navy ; but, on the other hand, it thus 
ent.viled the continuimce. for the time being, of 
war-time conditions, and left the German govern- 
ment powerless, in the relaxation of the Allies' sense 
of urgency, to hasten the conclusion of peace. 



THE SETTLEMENT 87 

Moreover, since an armistice is primarily a military 
and naval matter, it gave the soldiers and sailors 
a predominance in what were, in effect, partly 
peace discussions, to which the state of Europe 
as it then was, and, still more, as it was becoming, 
little entitled them. Thus it was that, whether 
througli inadvertence or pedantry, the strong 
recommendation made by the representative of 
the Allied Maritime Transport Council, that a 
provision should be included for the delivery of 
the German and Austrian merchant vessels and 
their control by the Council, was rejected, thus 
delaying for nearly four months the utilization of 
nearly a million tons of shipping at a time when 
Europe was crying out for sea-borne commodities. 
Little did the Chancellor think, when he yielded to 
Ludendorff's appeal in the lirst week of October, 
1918, that he was thereby "delaying the conclusion 
of peace, the return of the German prisoners, and 
the resumption of commercial and diplomatic 
relations between Germany and her enemies till 
January, 1920, and, indeed, in the case of the 
United States, till November, 192 1. 

October was occupied, on the diplomatic stage, by 
a correspondence between the President and the 
German government, culminating in a virtual 
demand by the former for the abdication of the 
Kaiser and an implied promise of better terms if it 
occurred. The Allies, who were, for the moment, 
out of the play, followed it with bated breath, not 
realizing the mischief that was in the making. Eor 
the President, had he only known it, was undermin- 
ing the very foundations of his own Liberal pro- 
gramme, and imperilhng the hope of its realization 



8S EUROPE I\ CONVALESCENCE 

in Centnil Europe. By appearing to cast the blame 
for the crime of the war upon the Kaiser and the 
small group of his governing circle, he encoiuaged 
the (.icrnum people in the fatal belief — still one of 
the main obstacles to the }x\\ce of Europe — that 
there is any essential ditlerence in public at'taii"s. and 
among a ci\ilized and instructed people, between 
sins of commission and of omission, and that those 
who had allowed themselves to be used as the willing 
and, indeed, enthusiastic instnunents of an ir- 
responsible and unscrupulous ruler, and had been 
ready to profit by his successes, could acquit them- 
selves of their responsibility by dri\ing him into the 
wilderness as a scapegoat. Moreover, and what was 
under the immediate circun\stances even woi^se, by 
asking the German people to etfect a clumge not 
pix)\-ided for in their constitution he was striking 
a blow at the s\'stem of limittxi ;vnd constitutioUvU 
monarchy which had now actually Ix^eji inaugurated 
and opening the door to revolution at the very 
moment when it was the duty of every good European, 
and of all who cared for Europe's welfvire, to promote 
stabihty and conservatism. The IVesident did 
indeed succeed, by his academic thundei^s, in driving 
the Kaiser into exile and bringing a German 
RepubUc into existence, but at what a cost ! The 
figurehead was changed, but, iis was inevitable, the 
administrative and judicial pei'sonnel remained. 
The new r«5ginie, insecurely, because hastily, 
estabhshed within the framework of the old order, 
had to face the whole odium of defeat, and of the 
economic disasters which followed it. \\'orst of all, 
the Germ.m people, having been led to beheve that 
thev could dissociate their own beha\iour from that 



THE SETTLEMENT 89 

of their rulers, were given, if not a legitimate, at 
least a natural and very liunian ground of griev- 
ance, when they discovered that the day of judg- 
ment still lay before and not behind them. 

Meanwiiilo, during the forty days' corrcispondence, 
Ludcndorii's empire fell into liquidation. On 
October 21 the German-Austrian deputies met alone 
for the first time, }^y the end of the month Czecho- 
slovakia and Jugo-Slavia were in being. Poland 
followed a few days later. In the Baltic provinces 
the Red Army of Russia was eagerly awaiting the 
German retreat. But the Continent was still cut 
off from the Ocean, and the inter- Allied organization 
was still making i)lans, as it was bound to do, for 
the continuance of the war into the next summer. 

When tlie President had brought his argument 
with the Germans to what he deemed a satisfactory 
conclusion he transmitted their request for an armis- 
tice to the Allied governments. He informed them at 
the same time that the German people were prepared 
to make peace " upon the terms and principles set 
forth" in his "address of January 8, 1918 " (the 
so-called Fourteen Points speech), " and subsequent 
addresses," including, of course, the address of Sep- 
tember 27, and enquired whether they were prepared 
to accept the same basis for detailed negotiations. 

The Supreme Council met on October 31, and on 
the 1st, 2nd, and 4th of November, to consider his 
communication. The minutes of these momentous 
meetings had, of course, not been made public, 
but, from the accounts given by M. Tardieu and 
others, it would seem that the discussion of the 
details of the armistice, which was, after all, the 
most urgent matter, took up the bulk of the time. 



00 EUROrE IN COXVAEESCENCE 

WTiethcr the addresses of the Prosideiit woro over 
coiiividorod in detail, and siibjectod lo an analysis of 
their va^ne and sometimes inconsistent phraseology, 
we ha\o as \et no otVicial means of knowing. It 
may. however, be eonjeetnred that the President's 
representative. Colonel House, considered that the 
United States slioiild cease hostilities upon this 
basis, whether the Allies accepted it or not. How- 
ever this may be, Brit.iin. Fnuice, and Itvily decided 
to signify their adherence to the President's " terms 
and principles " with three reservations. In the 
tii-st place, Britain, followed by the other Allies, 
struck out the clause relating to the freedom of the 
seas. In the second, again, it appears, on the 
British initiative, the President's references to 
reparation were accentuated and re-stated in the 
following formula : " Compensation shall be p^iid 
for all d.image done to the ci\ilian population of 
the Allies and their property by the aggression 
of Germany by land, by sea. and by air." Finally, 
the It;ilian representatives secured the placing 
on record of a statement that they did not regard 
the basis thus accepted for peace with GenUviny 
as governing the future settlement with Austria- 
Hungary. C)n November 5 the President informed 
the Gennan government, through the Swiss Minister 
at Washington, that the Allied governments had 
accepted his proposed basis, with the two reserva- 
tions mentioned. The It:Uian reservation, as not 
atfecting GenUvUiy, was not included in his com- 
munication, and, for some reason not hitherto 
disclosed, but surely little creditable to the Allied 
governments, it was not pubhshed separately, 
and only became known during the Fiume 



THE SETTLEMENT 91 

controversy some months later. On November 11 
the (icrman plenipotentiaries signed the armistice, 
practically on the terms submitted tliem by Marshal 
Foch, with an additional clause, due to the insistence 
of Herr Erzberger, stipulating that the Alliens con- 
templated the revictualling of Germany, but without 
providing for the shipping which would be required if 
others were not to go short to meet the German need. 

Let us pause to survey the political situation 
at which we have arrived. 

The Allied and enemy governments were now 
bound by two engagements. The hrst, in time as 
in importance, was the mutual pledge to conclude 
peace upon the terms and principles set forth in the 
President's addresses. Tliis pledge, offered by the 
Germans on October 5, had been accepted by the 
Allies witli certain reservations, in a communication 
dated November 4 and published three days later.* 
It is therefore generally known as the Pre- Armistice 
Agreement of November 4. The question has since 
been raised as to whether this mutual pledge, made 
by correspondence, constituted a binding inter- 
national agreement. Witliout going into techni- 
cahties, the point may be briefly answered. In the 
first place it was regarded as so binding by the 
parties, and by the Press and public men, in their 
comments ; at the time the vigorous protest made 
by the Austrahan Premier against the " bond " 
signed, as he complained, behind his back, may be 
recalled in particular ; and it was on the strength of 
this interpretation that the German government 
authorized its plenipotentiaries to sign the armistice 
by which it engaged to disband its forces. In the 

*See Appendix I. 



92 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

second place it was expressly stated to be so binding 
by the Allied governments on several occasions dur- 
ing subsequent negotiations, particularly in the 
covering letter accompanying the final terms sub- 
mitted to the German Peace Delegation in June, 
1919.' The agreement, then, must be regarded as 
being as solemn and as formal as any pact, like the 
Belgian Treaty of 1839, signed in due and proper 
form by plenipotentiaries round a table. And if there 
was one portion of it more binding than another it 
was the clause which the Allies drew up of their own 
motion, in order, as they said, that no misunderstand- 
ing might arise on the question of reparations. The 
wording of that clause, which has already been 
quoted, made it perfectly clear, both to the lay 
mind and to those who were famiUar with the 
technical discussions, that the Allies demanded only 
the payments due for damages suffered during the 
war by their civilian citizens, and renounced the 
request for an indemnity, on the 1S71 model, for the 
cost of the mihtar\' and naval operations themselves. 
The wisdom of such a renunciation, in view of the 
origin of the war, and of the cripphng cost of such 
items as pensions and separation allowances, par- 
ticularly to invaded states like France, Belgium, 
Serbia, and Italy, may be disputed. But as to the 
fact that it was made there can be no dispute. 
The Times, in its editorial of November 7, whilst not 
criticizing the policy adopted, characterized it as 
" an unusual concession to defeated enemies." 

It may be asked why, then, has so little been 
heard among the Alhed, and especially the British 
pubhc, of tlie agreement of No\'ember 4, and why 

*See Appendix II. 



THE SETTLEMENT 93 

is it still so widely believed that the war ended in an 
unconditional German surrender ? The answer is 
not creditable, but neither is it far to seek. It is 
because the Allies, and again especially the British 
government, took no steps whatever to enhghten the 
public as to the true nature of the diplomatic 
situation. Whether out of embarrassment or pre- 
occupation, the agreement was passed over in 
silence. The writer cannot recall a single instance 
during the last three years in which the British 
Premier, or the British Foreign Secretary, whose 
joint duty it is to keep the public abreast of 
important developments in our foreign poUcy, have 
made clear from the platform the real nature of the 
obligations assumed by us before the armistice to 
the enemy governments and peoples. 

There is a further aspect of the agreement of 
November 4 which has also been ignored. President 
Wilson's speeches ranged over a wide area, and the 
acceptance of the poUcies outUned in them covered 
a number of points already dealt with, in treaties 
concluded during the war — treaties which have been 
much criticized for their perhaps excusable secrecy, 
but are in some cases more open to attack for their 
substance. The Italian government, as we have 
already seen, had the foresight to think out the 
implications involved in the Wilson poUcy, and to 
keep its hands free within the sphere of its own 
special interests. But the very fact of this Itahan 
reservation was a vigorous reminder that the 
Wilson poUcy so publicly adopted, and at so 
solemn a moment, was incompatible with certain 
other precedent obhgations, and therefore neces- 
sarily, under the circumstances, superseded them. 



04 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

Since not all. but only the loading Allied Fowors, 
were represented at the Supreme Council at which 
the new poUcy was adopted, formal notice should 
perhaps have been sent to Serbia, Greece, and other 
Alhed states whose interests were thereby altected. 
The public, at any rate, which was told of the 
acceptance of the Wilson policy, naturally con- 
cluded that its impUcations were being worked out 
(which was indeed the case, so far as the experts 
were concerned), and would duly be embodied in 
the treaties. Had it known of the Italian reserva- 
tion regarding the Austro-Hungarian peace it 
would only have been contirmed in what, to the 
lay mind, seemed the only natural and practical 
\iew, that the acceptance of Wilson principles as 
governing the peace with Germ;my invohed also 
their acceptance for the settlement with Bulgaria, 
Tiu-key. and (with allowance for the Italian reserva- 
tion) Austria-Hungary. For was not the homo- 
geneity of the settlement one of the very principles 
laid down in the President's addresses? 

Why the President did not drive home this 
simple logic to the Allied statesmen in a brief tinal 
conununication is still an unexplained mystery. 
It is tnie that there were some of the secret 
engagements of which the President knew nothing 
till he reached Paris ; but there were other's, 
such as the Treaty of London, which had been 
widely published and the authenticity of which was 
known b\- most well-informed European students 
of affaii"s. Here was a grave and fat id fault of 
omission, which proved a seed of endless miscliief. 

The second binding agreement was the ainusiice 
itself. This was a document concerned, not with 



THE SETTLEMENT 95 

the peace settlement itself, but with the military and 
naval arrangements precedent to its negotiation. We 
have already seen that its negotiators, holding even 
too Kmited a view of its technical character, had 
rejected a provision which their economic advisers 
regarded as indispensable on more general grounds. 
But there was a further and more ominous factor 
in the situation on the morning when the armistice 
was signed. Both the governments which were pri- 
marily responsible for it no longer retained the confi- 
dence of their peoples. On Saturday, November 9, 
when the German plenipotentiaries were already on 
enemy soil, the explosion for which the President, 
whether consciously or not, had been laying the train 
took place in Berlin. Prince Max of Baden resigned.to 
be replaced, for the time being, by a provisional gov- 
ernment of Socialist Commissaries {Volksbcaufiragte). 
The Kaiser fled from Spa into Holland, and the minor 
German sovereigns and princes abdicated en masse. 
Meanwhile, on November 5, on the very day on which 
he forwarded to the German government the Allies' 
acceptance of his principles and pohcy, the result of 
the biennial Congressional elections showed that the 
President, who had appealed to the people on a party 
issue, would no longer command a majority in the 
legislature and joint treaty-making body. His own 
people had turned against the preacher at the moment 
of his greatest triumph abroad. Here, indeed, fate 
was weaving the matter for a confused and tragic 
denouement, " They are ringing their bells," 
remarked one who knew both Europe and America 
to the writer on the morning of November 11. 
" They will be wringing their hands soon." Pitt's 
sombre jest soon found fulfilment. 



96 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 



CHAPTER III 

FROM NOVEMBER II, I918, TO THE OPENING OF THE 
PEACE CONFERENCE 

On the morning of November ii the writer was one 
of those who stood at a Foreign Office window and 
watched Mr. Lloyd George at his door in Downing 
Street across the road, receiving the congratulations 
of the small crowd that had gathered at the news 
of the armistice. To the man in the street the 
Premier was the symbol of victory, and of the long 
effort now ended at last. But the men at the 
upper windows were looking, not back, but forward. 
His power they knew, and his energy, and his 
capacity for repairing what had been up to two 
years before an almost complete ignorance of 
Europe. Would he who now symboHzed victory 
have the vision and the courage and the humihty 
to become also Europe's chief artificer of peace 
and justice ? For it was plain that, in the complex 
and difficult tasks that lay ahead, the chief respon- 
sibility would fall upon Britain. France, who had 
borne the main and, for well-nigh two years, almost 
the whole brunt of the miUtary effort, was unnerved 
and exhausted. America was new to European 
problems. If Britain rose to the height of a great 
opportunity, she could dominate the coming confer- 
ence by her combination of ripe experience and 
unselfish detachment, and act as the interpreter of 
the wiser mind of America to an expectant Europe. 
On the afternoon of the same day chance brought 
the writer into contact with one who had come 
fresh from converse with the Premier. What he 



THE SETTLEMENT 97 

told was stunning, and what was even more stunning 
was the impression he conveyed of the atmosphere 
that he had just left. The Premier, so he said, 
was making ready for a General Election. This 
was not startling news in itself, although at such 
a moment, with Europe adrift and rudderless, it 
seemed a somewhat parochial preoccupation. 
Parliament was stale, the suffrage had been extended, 
and a General Election with a Umited mandate to 
strengthen a government which was then still a coali- 
tion of three out of the four parhamentary parties, 
in the coming tasks of negotiation and reconstruction 
was no unreasonable expedient. But this was 
not, it appeared, what was projected. The Premier 
intended to stiffen the ranks of his supporters, to 
organize what would, despite its name, be a new 
government party, and to appeal to the electors for 
a full five years' measure of confidence — in brief, 
to fight what would inevitably degenerate into a 
khaki election. Before the week was out the news 
was pubUc property. On Saturday, November 16, 
v/ithin five days of the armistice, the Premier had 
appeared at an old-style poHtical gathering, with a 
duke in the chair, and had inaugurated the most 
momentous election campaign in the whole record 
of the British Parhament. 

Let us pause for a moment to consider what a 
British Premier, at such a moment, might have told 
his fellow-countrymen. He could have begun by 
emphasizing the completeness of the victory, and 
the part played by British sea-power and British 
arms in securing it. He could have made them 
realize, what it was hard at such a moment, and after 
such an effort, for an unimaginative people Hke the 

Ge 



qS EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

English to t.ike in, that Prussian militarism lay in 
very truth in the dust, and that a new era was dawn- 
ing for Central and South-Eastern Europe. He 
could have told them of the many peoples, some of 
them ex-enemies, but some of them — the greater 
number — natural friends and alUes, who were now at 
length doU\ered from the yoke of Ludendorff's 
dominion. With the picturesque touch of which 
he is so inimitable a master he could have given the 
Bohemian and the Slovak, the Serb, the Croat, 
and the Slovene, the Pole, the Ruthene, and even the 
Magyar, not to speak of the nations of the Caucasus, 
Nearer Asia, and Syria, at least some f;unt shadow 
of reality for the British people. All these, he could 
have told them, were now hberated, expectant, and 
looking to Brit.un — the embodiment of the ripest 
political wisdom in the modern world — to help them 
through this crisis in their national hfe. He could 
have made them feel that they were living through 
one of those crucial and plastic moments of history 
which decide the fate of vast territories for many 
generations of men and women, imd that it was to 
Britain that these looked, imd looked with a naive, 
ardent, and unquestioning hope, all the greater 
because of the respect inspired in those of them who 
had encountered the British soldier or indi\idual 
representatives of the British name, to set them on 
the road to liberty, justice, and prosperity. Would 
Britain rise to the height of what men asked of her ? 
That, he could ha\'e pubhshed throughout the land, 
was the question which was to be decided at the 
polls. The war had ended a full six months earlier 
than the public had expected. We had. so to 
speak, six months' hghting power and six months' 



THE SETTLEMENT 99 

finance in hand. He did not ask the British people 
to sacrifice a single life on the tasks of European 
reconstruction. All he asked was that the men 
now under arms, or a suliicient proportion of them 
returning to the colours after a short leave to see 
their families, should undertake to serve on police 
duty on behalf of weaker nations faced with the 
task, at a moment's notice, of organizing a govern- 
ment out of chaos ; and that British credit should 
be mobihzed, together with the credit of the United 
States, of France, Italy, and Japan, and he ventured 
to hope, of neutral peoples, such as Norway, Sweden, 
Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland, if they, too, 
felt any responsibiUty towards their less fortunate 
neighbours, in a combined international credit 
scheme for restoring the productive power of an 
impoverished Continent, 

Then he could have spoken to them of the League 
of Nations. He could have explained to them that, 
between nations as between classes, there is no true 
relationship of co-operation, still less of fraternity, 
between the rich and the destitute. He could have 
made them see, he of all men, with his unerring power 
of making a telling point, that to form an association, 
whether of nations or individuals composed of 
debtors and creditors was to build upon the sand, 
and that a League of Nations thus composed would 
never win the confidence of expectant and practical 
men and women. Finance, he could have exclaimed, 
was the key to the settlement, as sea-power and 
shipping had been to the war. Set Europe on her 
feet again as the busy centre of the world's industries, 
fill her empty factories with raw material, provide 
employment for her demobilized soldiers, put them 



100 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

to work upon the goods for which, at the moment, 
everyone is asking, and everyone is still able to pay, 
and you will be keeping solvent — naj^ more, keeping 
alive (for it is a matter of hfe and death to tens of 
thousands) — men and women who will be your 
friends and your customers in after years. 

As regards the German people, our relations, he 
could have said, will be difficult. We owe them the 
strictest and most punctual justice. We must carry 
out, in the letter and in the spirit, the terms on which 
they laid down their arms. But we cannot forget, 
and it is for us to see that they come to understand, 
the nature of the crime in which they have been the 
passive, but no less for that the responsible, accom- 
pHces. They must reahze what it means to have 
brought war, and four and a half years of anguish 
and misery, upon the peoples whose homes they 
have destroyed or defiled. If Cologne and Frankfort 
stand where they have stood for centuries, while 
Ypres and Arras and Belgrade are in ruins, let 
us see to it that, according to the strict letter of 
the terms, German}^ pays, and pays as quickly as her 
revived production allows, for every wrong that she 
has done, so far as it can be assessed in money value, 
towards the civiHan populations of her enemies. It 
is true that, on this basis, Britain will not receive 
so much as those whose civilian populations have 
suffered, not on sea and from the air only, but on 
land ; but the victims of the Zeppelin and the 
dependents of our heroic merchant seamen will be 
provided for ; and as Britain and her Dominions did 
not enter the war with the thought of gain, neither 
would they desire to strike a hard bargain in the 
moment of victory. We are a nation of seamen 



THE SETTLEMENT loi 

and of traders ; and, as such, we have played our 
good part in the common effort. But we are not a 
nation of shopkeepers. 

Thus it was that he might have spoken and 
could have spoken. The facts were at his command, 
and the men who had worked out their imphcations 
were at his service. Nor was he, so it appears, 
unaware of the opportunity opened out to him. 
One of those who pleaded with him in this sense 
during those critical days has related how the 
Premier, with a good angel at one ear and a bad 
at the other, seemed nearly won to the better 
cause. He erred, not, Hke the English people, 
out of ignorance, but deliberately, out of cowardice 
and lack of faith. At the pinnacle of his career, 
when the moral leadership of Europe lay within 
his grasp, he yielded to the Tempter and made 
what will live in human annals as one of the Greatest 
Refusals in history. He sinned against the Hght, and 
the sin of one weak mortal, entrusted with power for 
which he had not the moral stature, caused suffering 
to millions, and kept a continent in chaos. For all 
his bravado, he has been a haunted man ever since. 

During the first week after the armistice the moral 
thermometer of the British people went down some 
fifty degrees. During the subsequent month, right 
up to polling day in the middle of December, it con- 
tinued to fall. The self-dedication, the unselfish 
idealism, the sense of national and individual 
responsibility for the making of a better world, pain- 
fully achieved and sustained throughout more than 
four years of tension were dissipated in a riot of 
electioneering, thrown like chaff on the winds of 
demagogic claptrap and invective. A section of the 



102 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

Press, with a lapse of memory more excusable in 
journalism than in statesmanship, neglecting the 
Pre-Armistice Agreement of but a week or two 
before, loudly demanded that Germany should be 
asked to defray the entire cost of the war. After a 
few vain attempts at evasion, the Premier yielded, 
and was then led on, floundering and uncomfortable, 
from one pitfall to another. Ignoring the state of 
Europe and the appeals which were already pressing 
in for the services of British troops in maintaining 
order, and equally bhnd to the state of employment 
at home, he pledged himself to rapid demobiUza- 
tion ; then, faced with the possibiHty of Britain 
entering the council chamber shorn of the force 
wherewith to execute her decisions, he turned round 
and with characteristic insouciance made perhaps 
the greatest incursion ever attempted by a British 
statesman into continental politics by calhng for 
the aboUtion of all conscript armies. Danes and 
Dutchmen, Swedes and Swiss, unfamiliar with 
slapdash thinking, not hitherto associated with a 
British Premier, must have rubbed their eyes in 
amazement, but the compatriots of j\Iarshal Foch, 
who had surely a right at such a moment to feel a 
pride in the military system which had borne them 
to victory, may have been pardoned for being 
conscious of other sentiments than surprise. And 
so the campaign proceeded. To speak of Central 
Europe in terms of relief, of encouragement, of 
organization, was to be stamped as a " pro-German," 
and, in the eyes of the unenlightened electorate, 
Central Europe was still thought of as either wholly 
German or as still under German dominion. It 
was not till many months after the armistice that 



THE SETTLEMENT 103 

the term " Central Empires " fell into disuse among 
public speakers and writers.* The problems of the 
newly hberated states remained wholly unknown, 
and the problems of Germany herself were minimized 
and evaded by politicians, whose business was 
rather to ride to victory on past events than to 
shed hght on the existing situation. Thus it was 
that by a crowning instance of that British slow- 
wittedness which has sometimes carried English- 
men in the past through dangers greater than they 
knew, during the weeks when her statesmen were 
marring the future for which the flower of her 
youth had given their lives, the conscience of Britain 
found no tongue wherewith to speak. The Press, 
the Universities, the Churches, all ignored the 
infamy which was being committed. Here and 
there a brave voice hke that of Bishop Gore, 
representative of the true Christianity, was raised 
in protest against the hurricane ; but there was no 
organized opposition. The official leaders of the 
Church, evidently regarded the question of the 
violation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement as beyond 
their province. A year later they were organizing 
collections on Holy Innocents' Day for the count- 
less victims of a ruler who, if less direct a murderer 
than his predecessor, had slain his tens of thousands 
where Herod had, at the most, slain thousands. 
Even the opposing political parties were cowed 
into silence. The Labour manifesto demanded 
reparation without making clear the vital distinction 
between damages and war-costs, whilst the Liberal 
leader lamely admitted, to his shame, in answer 
to a Scottish heckler, that the claim to total 

^* It occurs prominently in a New York Na/t'on in an October, 1921, issue. 



104 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

war-costs was justifiable. It did not save him his 
seat. 

Meanwhile, what was happening in the wider 
world ? The story of the first eight or ten weeks 
after the armistice can be summed up in three 
words — delay, confusion, and disillusionment. 
Hostilities with Austria-Hungary and Turkey had 
ended in each case with an armistice and a conse- 
quent military occupation ; but the resulting prob- 
lems were left to be handled by those most directly, 
and therefore the less impartially, concerned with 
them. The Austro-Hungarian armistice line, drawn 
up by the Italian Commander-in-Chief and hastily 
passed by the Supreme Council at Paris, corre- 
sponded in a remarkable manner with the line drawn 
in the Treaty of London ; and the Jugo-Slavs of 
Ljubliana and Split and Sebenik and Kotor, who 
were expecting a composite force of Allied troops 
to consohdate their liberation from the Habsburg 
yoke, found themselves with Italians alone quar- 
tered upon them, to remain there for many months 
and spread new seeds of embitterment and misun- 
derstanding. Sarajevo and Zagreb in their turn were 
left almost entirely to the Serbs. Meanwhile the 
Turkish armistice produced an even more plenteous 
harvest of strife, culminating eventually in a new 
war which, as these lines are being written, is still 
proceeding. But that lies outside the framework 
of this volume. 

As for the economic problem, the master question 
of the moment, it was simply shelved. The Tad- 
poles and Tapers who were busy cutting coupons 
and counting constituencies had no time to spare on 
trivial tasks, such as the restocking and re victualling 



THE SETTLEMENT 105 

of Europe. The momentum of war-time policy 
and organization lasted long enough for the British 
Cabinet to approve and transmit, on November 13, 
a proposal emanating from the AUied Maritime 
Council for that body and its staff to be merged into 
a General Economic Council, " which would 
co-ordinate the work of the various councils, and 
through them the work of the Programme Com- 
mittees " for the problems of the transition period. 
But when the proposal met with unintelligent 
opposition from Washington, it was not pressed by 
a government which, as the days went on, was less 
and less incKned to identify itself with a heaUng 
and remedial poHcy for Central Europe. The 
result was first a deadlock and then a rapid dis- 
mantling and disintegration of the whole organization 
so laboriously built up. First the American repre- 
sentatives declined to continue serving, in face of 
the attitude of their government, and then, with 
the discontinuance of the financial arrangements 
under which it had been carried on, the other 
governments, already debtors, lost interest in 
the work. When, in December, the Food Controllers 
and other interested members of the AlUed govern- 
ments met, at Mr. Hoover's instigation, to consider 
the problem of revictualling, now growing increas- 
ingly urgent, it was upon the basis of the creation of 
an entirely new body. After endless discussion, 
centring round the degree of executive power to be 
delegated by the governments to the director of 
operations, an Allied Supreme Council of Supply and 
Relief was eventually established in January, 1919. 
What followed is best described in the words of the 
historian of the inter-Allied shipping control. The 



io6 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

new Council, " restricted to one not clearly separable 
■part of the many economic problems facing the Allies, 
without the assistance of a staff accustomed to work 
together, and without either the uniting influence 
of war or the tradition of united action which that 
force had given to the war organization, proved 
ineffective. In Febniar}^, 1919, it was merged in 
and replaced by the Supreme Economic Council, 
which was in personnel, in functions, and in general 
principles of organization, almost exactly the same 
as the body into wliich the Transport Executive had 
proposed to transform the Transport Council at the 
beginning of the previous November. Even so, 
however, the new Council was too tardily com- 
menced, too hurriedly improvised, and insufhciently 
equipped with a personnel accustomed to corporate 
work. ]\Ioreover, over three invaluable months had 
in the meantime been lost. There can be httle 
doubt that if the two proposals made by the Trans- 
port Executive before the armistice had been 
adopted, the economic position in the spring of 
1919, and possibly afterwards, would have been 
substantially better. The German ships would have 
been at work in December instead of March, and 
food would have gone into Germany as from January 
instead of April, with results it is not easy now to 
measure exactly upon the pohtical position in 
Germany and the consequent difficulties of the 
earlier peace negotiations. At the same time the 
rehef assistance given to the rest of Europe would 
have been facihtated." 

These words, with the wealth of human meaning 
which must be read into their official phrasing, 
should serve to destroy the legend, so current in 



THE SETTLEMENT 107 

Germany and elsewhere, which makes the continu- 
ance of the blockade one of the chief indictments 
against the Alhes' policy after the armistice. It 
was not the continuance, but, to put it parodoxically, 
the discontinuance of the blockade wherein their 
real fault consisted, or, in other words, the discon- 
tinuance of the positive system of inter-Allied 
economic organization which had developed, after 
four and a half years of warfare, out of what had 
originally been estabhshed with a negative and 
preventive function. The blockade, as we have 
seen, was continued for mihtary and naval reasons. 
But it would have been useful also for economic 
reasons, as a safeguard of the policy of "no cake 
until all have bread," against the indiscriminate 
use of shipping space for other than necessary 
freight, had it been supplemented by positive 
measures of organization such as had been worked 
out by the responsible authorities. As it was, the 
blockade lay like a dead hand over Central Europe ; 
the German ships stayed idle in German harbours, 
and the organization which should and could have 
sped the productive forces of Europe on their way 
was allowed to disintegrate in obscurity. 

Before concluding this section of our survey we 
must take a glance across the Atlantic. We have 
seen that the Washington government was opposed 
to the formation of a General Economic Council. It 
" took the view," to quote our authority once more, 
" that it was desirable after the cessation of hostilities 
that the war organization should be discontinued, 
and that where necessary the new problems of the 
armistice period should be dealt with by appropriate 
new machinery." This line of pohcy on the part 



io8 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

of President Wilson was partly due to sheer ignorance 
of the economic situation in Europe and the indispen- 
able part that the inter- Allied economic organization 
had been placing, and should be allowed to continue 
to play — an ignorance which was not corrected 
till his arrival in Europe at Christmas. It was 
partly also due to an academic habit of thought, 
which made a clean and theoretical break between 
war-time and peace-time problems, and looked 
forward to the establishment of new working 
machinery on his own American model. In any 
case, it would have been better for Europe if the 
President had either not come over at all and 
delegated fuller powers to his economic experts on 
the spot, or had taken the first ship after the 
armistice. As it was, he delayed in America long 
enough to allow the disintegrating process to make 
headway, and to make the fatal address to Congress 
on December 2, when, no doubt to conciliate 
the Repubhcan opposition, he declared for the 
aboUtion of war-time controls. Having thus struck 
a blow in the dark at the Continent which looked 
to him as its Messiah, he took ship, together with 
his Secretary of State, with the scheme of a League 
of Nations in his pocket which he refrained from 
discussing with him. He reached Brest on December 
13 and London on the 26, on the eve of the 
declaration of the polls, and drove through cheering 
Christmas crowds to Buckingham Palace. Next day 
the same small group of Foreign Office workers 
stood on a balcony and watched him enter No. 10 
Downing Street to confer with the British Cabinet. 
As he stood on the threshold, with the Premier 
awaiting him within, he turned round to the moving 



THE SETTLEMENT 109 

picture men and smiled as they revolved their 
handles. The man behind him, had he only known 
it, had already stabbed him in the back. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PEACE CONFERENCE 

After this meeting between the British and 
American representatives, which, warned by one 
experience of an Anglo-Saxon Preliminary Confer- 
ence, President Harding resolutely declined to 
repeat, the statesmen in whose hands lay the 
destinies of Europe at last met face to face in full 
conference at Paris. It was now the second week 
in January, nearly two months after the armistice. 
But it was still not a Peace Conference, but a 
preliminary conference of the victorious powers to 
determine the terms which should be offered to the 
plenipotentiaries of the enemy ; and the idea of 
concluding a Prehminary Peace with each of the 
five enemy powers, which remained, as late as March, 
in the minds of those responsible for the technical 
procedure, was eventually abandoned. It was 
resolved, instead, to concentrate into one huge 
document all the matters that required to be 
regulated with each of the enemy states respectively, 
and to set to work first upon the German volume. 
As a result, no personal conference took place with 
the enemy delegates at all and, to quote from the 
most authoritative British account of the proceed- 
ings " the complexity of conditions and the pressure 
of time compelled the Treaty to be drawn up in 
sections and prevented the cumulative and converging 



no EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

effect of the provisions from being realized at 
the time." The Gemian vohmie thus composed, 
was ready in I\Iay, and then made known in a bare 
summary, which rendered effective criticism difficult, 
to the AlUed peoples. It was signed on June 28 
and subsequently ratified, after debates which were 
little concerned with its details, in the British and 
Dominion, as in the other Allied, Parliaments. 
It came into force, after a formal exchange of 
ratifications, on January 10, 1920 ; but it was not 
till the Spa meeting in the summer of that year that 
British, French, and German statesmen met for the 
first time round a table as — had Ludendorff not put 
his professional pride before the interests of his 
country — the}^ might have met in October, 1918. 

Exhausted by the mass of work involved in the 
preparation of the German volume, the four rested 
from their labours in the summer of 1919. Austria- 
Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey were still waiting 
to know their fate. The last-named, indeed, 
favoured by an unduly lenient armistice, had by 
now, with the diminution of the AlHed armies, 
recovered her old-time obstinacy and almost for- 
gotten her defeat. When she needed a reminder 
the Greeks were the only instrument of AlHed 
power available. They landed in Smyrna, and 
plunged into a Xenophontic adventure of which it 
is no easier for Athens than for the Western observer 
to see the end. It was September 10 before the 
Austrian Treaty was ready and signed. The Bul- 
garian followed on November 27, and the Hungarian 
on June 4, 1920, to be ratified only in July, 1921, 
whilst the Turkish, put together with infinite labour 
at San Remo and elsewhere, was eventually signed 



THE SETTLEMENT iii 

on August i6, 1920, only to be torn in pieces by 
the defeat of Venizelos at the polls and the return 
of King Constantine with fresh ideas and ambitions. 
It was not till September i, 1921, that Great Britain, 
though still at war with Turkey, was able to proclaim 
the official " termination of the war." Such is the 
long arm of consequence resulting from the 
thoughtless adoption of a vicious procedure. 

But this brief discussion on methods has carried 
the story too quickly forward. It is time to return 
from procedure to substance. It was a conference 
of victors both great and small ; but it was soon 
apparent that, as in 1815, the power would be 
wielded by those who had also the responsibility. 
The arrangement by which decisions were made by 
the four or five Great Powers and communicated, as 
edicts, to their smaller colleagues, would have been 
above criticism had the Great Powers themselves 
been conscious of the greatness of their obligations. 
But the British General Election had poisoned the 
atmosphere. The British Premier entered the 
conference-room with his election pledges hanging 
Uke a millstone round his neck. In order to embody 
in the Treaty financial demands which he knew would 
be contested, and rightly contested, by the President 
as contrary to the Pre-Armistice Agreement, he was 
constantly forced to throw wider considerations to 
the winds ; and to avoid the employment of British 
and Dominion troops, now in rapid process of de- 
mobilization on ships which should have been used 
for the restocking and revictualUng of Europe, he 
was obliged to dally and temporize with difficulties 
which, with the British army still in being, he might 
easily have prevented from ever arising at all. 



112 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

Great Britain was indeed being overwhelmed 
during those months, as the Foreign Secretary once 
stated, by demands for British troops, for the ser\'ices 
of those kindly but inarticulate khaki battahons 
whose imperturbable sang-froid and good humour, 
had they arrived in good time, could have maintained 
a temporary Pax Britannica anywhere from Riga to 
Reichenberg and Teschen, from Danzig to Fiume, 
and from Beuthen to Lemberg and Buda-Pesth. 

The British election commitments had another and 
even more disastrous reaction upon the Conference. 
They rendered it impossible for British statesmen to 
argue against the validity of such of the arrange- 
ments concluded during the war as conflicted with. 
the AMlsonian basis of peace. Those who had them- 
selves been the first to violate the Pre-Armistice 
Agreement were in no position to remind Italiaji, 
Japanese, Roumanian, and other statesmen of its 
imphcations in regard to the so-called " secret 
treaties." It was no doubt an inexplicable mistake 
of tactics on the part of the President that he did 
not drive his own logic home in November and 
obtain an c. "^ress repudiation of claims contrary 
to the Pre-Armistice basis while the American army 
was still an indispensable instrument of victory. Or 
he could have registered a pubUc protest, and left 
the Conference on the first occasion that the validity 
of such claims was maintained in his presence, in- 
stead of allowing himself to be entangled in detailed 
discussions and compromises. But it was upon 
Britain, with her greater knowledge and experience, 
that the responsibility for such a protest really 
rested. Together, Britain and America could have 
made a clean sweep of the diplomatic cobwebs of the 



THE SETTLEMENT 113 

war. But such a collaboration, if it was to be 
successful, implied a willingness both to adopt a 
generous and comprehensive economic policy and to 
subordinate individual claims and interests to 
broader human ends. The President, who had no 
claims to make except for a few ships and cables, 
would have been ready for such an alliance. But 
his British colleague, unhke his greater forbear in 
1815, was tied hand and foot by his election pledges, 
and the devoted labour of subordinates, eager to 
set their knowledge and their sympathy at the 
service of Europe, were of Uttle avail when their 
chief was largely estopped from making use of them^ 
As a result the Treaties were not, as the President 
hoped, a clean-drawn charter of a new Europe, but 
represented a compromise between the conscientious 
labours of experts on the one hand and the claims 
and commitments of pohticians on the other. What 
is sound and enduring in them — and it is much — 
is due mainly to the diplomats ; and what is flimsy, 
faulty, and indefensible to the pohticians. Had the 
expert staffs of the five Great Powers, the much- 
abused and much-derided bureaucrats who, because 
their tongues are tied, are so convenient a scapegoat 
for other men's sins, been left alone to draw up the 
Treaties, they would have emerged devoid of most 
of the imperfections which mar their usefulness as 
the basis of the public law of post-war Europe. As it 
is, there is httle in their territorial provisions which 
is unanswerably indefensible ; but the process of 
bargaining and bartering which accompanied their 
drafting led to much ill-will and recrimination, 
which has had a lasting effect on the mutual relations 
of the signatory powers, both great and small. 
He 



114 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

History will assess the full measure of the moral 
injury intiicted upon the world, and the British 
Empire, by Britain's sudden swerve towards selfish- 
ness. For the moment, it would seem to mark the 
first step in a process of disintegi^ation which later 
statesmen, even if, as they surely must, they 
acknowledge, and seek publicly to retrieve, the sins 
of their predecessoi-s, will find it hard to arrest ; 
for the accumulated moral capital of a wide-spread- 
ing Commonwealth like ours, once wantonly 
dissipated, is not so quickly regained. Thus the 
pubUc opinion of the Dominions, alwaj-s susceptible, 
despite an outward show of independence, to Enghsh 
fashions of thought, was quick to follow the Premier 
down the slipping slope ; and the chosen represen- 
tatives of the men who at Ypres and at Vimj', at 
Pozicres and Villers Bretonneux, had giveji their 
all for the cause of freedom, without one least 
thought of fee or gain, engaged themselves to their 
peoples to bring home substantial spoils in pounds 
or dollars, and were still, thirty months afterwards, 
hagghng painfully over the percentage division of 
an indemnity to which, for all practical purposes, 
they had no rightful claim at all. \Miat chance, in 
such an atmosphere, had the Italian proposal for 
the cancelling of inter- Allied debts, and the launching 
of an international credit scheme, modestly put 
forward by a nation which was dependent, for the 
moment, for raw materials, foodstuffs, and financial 
favours upon AUies who took no pains to conceal 
their dominant and domineering position ? France, 
with her industry crippled and with the gaping 
wound in her side, was, for the time being, equally 
dependent — so at least her Premier considered — 



THE SETTLEMENT 115 

upon the good graces of Britain ; so, with a mistaken 
judgment which M. Tardicu, with all his Uterary 
abihty, is able but lamely to defend, she determined 
to associate herself with a view of the German 
liabiUties which, by including items of pure war- 
costs, contrary to the Pre-Armistice Agreement, 
inevitably put her own just claims for reparation 
in the shade and by nearly trebling the total bill 
made it increasingly difficult to begin extract- 
ing payment from Germany at all.* Dearly have 
the two countries, bound together by the holiest 
of ties, suffered, individually and in their mutual 
relations, from the relapse of the one into the old 
discredited manners of petty shopkeeping, and for 
the reliance of the other, honourable, if, for once, 
mistaken, on the generous and moderating tradition 
of British foreign policy. Clcmenceau had known 
and watched English statesmanship, for over fifty 
years, with all its intellectual limitations and com- 
pensating integrity and sense of honour. How 
could he be expected to realize that, by a strange 
accident of fortune, this crisis in British history 
found, for once, no English gentleman at the helm ? 
Thus it was that, without unity of purpose or 
of principle, without the force to uphold their 
decisions, and steeped in an atmosphere of vague 
idealism which became daily more unreal and 
hypocritical as day followed sickening day, the 
four dictators sat and drew hues on the map of 
Europe while the power was steadily sHpping from 
their grasp. For the peoples of the Continent, 
cheated of the hopes of which Peace had been the 
symbol, driven half crazy by having to live, at the 

' ikee Appendices III., IV., and V. 



ii6 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

expected moment of relief, through the worst of 
five war-winters, were turning their eyes towards 
Bolshevism — from the unhelpful phrase-makers and 
Parliamentarians of W^'estern democracy to the 
rough-handed dictators of Moscow. There, at 
least, was action, not inertia, and a faith that gave 
life and meaning to the formulae of platform and 
manifesto. The red tide, which, in one critical 
week, had even washed the sturdy bourgeois 
ramparts of Switzerland and the Netherlands, 
swept for a moment over IMunich, threatened 
Vienna, and submerged Buda-Pesth. A Red 
Hungarian army, half Bolshevik, half Nationalist, 
invaded Slovakia ; while in Russia itself a Jew 
who had but lately been an Eastside journalist 
in New York was in command of an army which, 
with the melting of the Allied forces, was soon to 
be the largest in Europe. Poland, Roumania, 
the new-born Baltic states, trembled for their 
independence. Allied troops sufficient to face the 
menace were not available. The peoples of Central 
Europe learnt, in bitter moments of helplessness, 
to rely on their own right arm ; and if Poland 
and Roumania, Czecho-Slovakia and Jugo-Sla\ia, 
seeking to weld their composite youth into a trust- 
worthy defence force against dangers far less 
imaginar}' than those now confronted by the 
British Navy, are employing French or French- 
trained instructors to hasten and to perfect the 
process, this should be a cause neither of astonish- 
ment nor reproach to those who had not the wisdom 
to foresee their needs. Had we supplied them in 
good season with the means and the material for 
productive work, many of the men who are now 



THE SETTLEMENT 117 

being called, and flock, not unwillingly, to those 
banners would have been busy creating wealth, and 
the purchasing power, for the lack of which Britain 
and industrial America are paying in unemployment 
to-day. It is not for us to preach disarmament to 
nations of whose mutual exasperations we are our- 
selves largely the cause. Let us do what is still 
possible to provide the productive activities which 
will serve to allay their suspicions and provocations 
and thus gradually to compose their feuds. 

We have seen that a supreme Economic Council 
was eventually appointed after three months of 
heart-breaking delay, and with an untrained staff, 
in February, 191 9. But the situation was now 
irreparably out of hand ; and, in any case, its 
powers were too hmited to enable it to achieve 
results of lasting value. What should have been 
handled in October as a combined problem of 
credit, transport, and supply was left to be handled 
in February as a mere problem of relief. With 
matters as they then were no other measures, or, 
at least, no other first measures, were possible ; 
but charity is always tainting, not least between 
nations ; and the disadvantages attaching to its 
adoption have in this case been slow to efface them- 
selves. Sir William Goode and Mr. Hoover and 
their able staff of relief workers rendered yeoman 
service, on a field familiar to the British and 
American mind, from Germany and Austria as far 
afield as Armenia ; and they were discreetly 
reinforced by private agencies, notably by the 
Society of Friends. But the inevitable relation- 
ship of patronage has brought subtle and demorahz- 
ing influences in its train. In Austria, shorn of 



iiS EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

her self-respect, it has bred a Ustless spirit of 
pauperism which the energetic promoters of the 
Ter Meulen credit scheme are discovering to be not 
the least fonnidable of their many obstacles in 
their attempt to set that country on its feet, while 
Gennan pride has only survived the humiliation of 
witnessing the centre of the worlds cultiu-e treated 
as an object of pity and rehef by trying to regard 
it as an act of just, if insufficient, atonement to a 
martyr nation. Here, as in the nationahst feuds 
f mother east, the sufferings and passions of the post- 
war period have echpsed the memory of the war 
itself, and the Germans tind in our failure to help 
them, as we could and should have helped them, 
out of their self-inflicted distresses, fresh reasons 
for fortifying their threatened self-righteousness 
and for refusing to face the real issues and origins 
of the war. Germany in the autmnn of 191S 
resembled a patient emerging, exhausted but 
convalescent, from a prolonged period of hallucina- 
tion. Handled with tirmness and understanding, 
above all, with consistency, she might have been 
set on the road to a rapid heahng ; but iirst the 
American, then the British, doctor bungled the 
case ; and the latter's blunder was the gieater in 
that he destroyed the growing morale of the German 
people by supplying it with just that with which 
it is above all things necessary that such a patient 
should not make play — a genuine grievance. Until 
the manifest injustice of the Pensions ajid Separa- 
tion Allowance clauses of the Versailles Treaty is 
pubUcly removed, Germany will remain blind to 
her own guilt, and will apply a diseased and jaun- 
diced vision to this or that other clause of the 



THE SETTLEMENT 119 

Treaty, which, if necessarily harsh, is perfectly 
compatible with the terms of her surrender. 

No less disastrous has been the effect upon the 
British people of the great outburst of charitable 
organization which followed the discovery, months 
after the event, of the consequences of the failure 
of their statesmen to lead Europe back towards 
prosperity. They sought, as so often, to excuse 
want of foresight and lack of courage by fumbUng 
in their pockets and producing handsome subscrip- 
tions. The English-speaking peoples are giant 
givers, and it is ungracious to criticize what is, after 
all, a golden virtue of their defects ; but money 
given by private individuals in a tardy attempt to 
cure what should have been prevented by pubUc 
poHcy carries with it less than the usual blessing ; 
and it cannot be too often repeated to those who, 
for all their subscription lists, are at bottom still 
parochially-minded, that, as charity is no substitute 
for justice, neither is organization a substitute for 
personal affection and understanding. It is a 
redeeming feature in these poor charitable make- 
shifts for statesmanship that they have, at least in 
some cases, helped to bring such understanding about. 

Meanwhile, to return to the Conference, if the 
settlement of Europe lagged, the organization of 
the world proceeded with amazing, and indeed 
ominous, rapidity. The President had arrived in 
Paris with the draft of a League of Nations in his 
pocket. Lord Robert Cecil met him with another 
draft, which had been passed by the British Cabinet. 
Out of a conflation of the two the Covenant took 
shape, and, after a few weeks of evening sittings, 
the document which was to bring lasting peace and 



120 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

justice to a distracted world was ready to be pre- 
sented to a full meeting of the Conference in 
February. Soon afterwards it was announced that 
it would be embodied in each of the five Treaties, 
thus becoming automatically, and without the 
summoning of a special conference, part of the 
public law of the world. On January lo, 1920, when 
the German Treaty came into force, the League of 
Nations was born ; and ever since, and, indeed, 
already before that date, the devoted and truly 
international staff of the secretariat, drawn from 
ex-AlUed and ex-neutral peoples alike, and now open 
to two of the ex-enemies as well, have been seekuig 
to repair, or rather to build up afresh, what might 
have been saved and spared had the originator of the 
Covenant been more ahve to the realities of the 
world he tried so hard to serve. The League is still 
a plant of tender growth ; but no one who has seen 
its staff at work, and considered the range and 
volume of the business entrusted to it, can doubt 
that it stands not merely as an idea and a symbol, 
but by virtue of substantial achievement. It is one 
of the ironies of history that what will Uve, after 
all, both in idea and fact, as one of the greatest con- 
tributions made by America to the life of the parent 
continent, should have been the cause, or the 
occasion, of the downfall of its author among his 
own countrymen. When the United States Senate 
rejected the Treaties because the Covenant was 
contained in them, the blow was aimed at the 
President. But it was Europe as a whole that was 
the sufferer. Thus, by an unwitting stroke, was 
the victim of European diplomacy avenged. 



PART III 

THE OUTLOOK 

L'avenir, c'est nous-mimes 



CHAPTER I 

THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK 

The war, as we have seen, has destroyed two of the 
six Great Powers of pre-war Europe and gravely 
crippled a third. How will the collective affairs of 
Europe be managed in the coming years ? What 
will take the place of the old Concert of the Powers, 
or of the Balance of Powers into which it was not 
infrequently resolved ? 

President Wilson was in no doubt as to an answer. 
" The old discredited game of the Balance of Power," 
he said in one of his addresses which formed the 
accepted basis of peace, was to pass away for ever, 
to be replaced by a system of firm and single-minded 
co-operation, carried on through the agency, not 
of the old diplomatic machinery, but of a new 
organization, the League of Nations. In the 
President's conception the league was to take over 
all that was best and most responsible in the old 
Concert of the Great Powers, with four improve- 
ments. It was to be world wide instead of 
European. It was to include small States as well 
as great. It was to do its work through a permanent 
routine organization which was to meet at regular 
intervals and be virtually indissoluble. Finally, 
it was to be the instrument of a single concerted 
pohcy based upon a common set of Hberal poUtical 
principles. The League of Nations, in other words, 
was to be the international instrument of an ideaUstic 
liberalism, as the Holy AUiance, in its day, was of 

133 



124 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

a benevolent Conservatism and the Vatican of the 
political philosophy of the Roman Cathohc Church. 

It was with this conception in his mind that the 
President hastened the preparation of the Covenant 
and insisted upon its inclusion in each of the treaties 
of peace. If the framework of the new world could 
but be rightly constructed, compromises of principle 
and blmidei"s of improvization made witliin its 
hmits could, so he thought, be corrected at leisure. 
The one indispensable prerequisite was to proNide 
mankind with an instrumentality which would 
enable it to work out its own political salvation. 

Does the League, as it now stands, two years 
after its inauguration, till the place designed for 
it bj' its author, or is it hkely to step into it witliin 
the coming generation ? Both questions must be 
answered with a frank negative. The League is 
not doing, and is not now hkely to do, the work for 
which it was designed. That is not to say that it 
is a failure, or that it is of little value. On the con- 
trary, it is an indispensable part of the machinery 
of civihzation, and is dailj^ increasing its usefulness. 
But the work wliich it is doing is not of the same 
order as the work for which the President designed 
it, and tlie sooner tliis is recognized by public 
opinion the sooner we shall return to an atmosphere 
of candour and reahty in international affairs. 
Much confusion has been caused by those who have 
persisted in preacliing the League of Nations as 
a panacea long after such potentiahties of that 
nature as it ever possessed had evaporated from 
the scene. Englishmen in particular, who are apt 
to atfect for European issues a sentimentality which 
they would not dream of applying to their own more 



THE OUTLOOK 125 

intimate concerns, have grown into the habit of 
saying that Europe has to choose between the way 
of the League and the way of suicide and ruin. 
This is one of those clean logical dilemmas which 
spring from an ignorance of fact and detail. Such 
language, so far from testifying to a faith in the 
League, is little more than a self-righteous soporific 
— a convenient way of dissolving an awkward and 
complicated subject in a cloud of vague benevolence. 
One is reminded of the old lady who refused to face 
the possibihty of a world war in 19 14 because she 
was convinced that " the Powers would intervene." 
The League of Nations is not, and was never in- 
tended to be, a substitute for the governments of 
its component states. As its name implies, it is a 
league, an alliance, an instrument of co-operation, 
not a government. Co-operation, however, pre- 
supposes common policies and common aims ; and 
it is here that the League, or rather its member- 
ship, has disappointed the expectations of its 
founder. In his relative inexperience of European 
problems and politics the President beUeved that 
liberal principles, sincerely accepted and honestly 
applied by the European powers, would lead to the 
adoption of a common policy, at least in the major 
problems. A few weeks', even a few days', 
experience of the Peace Conference was enough to 
prove that such a hope was vain. On the Russian 
question, the first large immediate issue with which 
the Conference had to deal, no concerted European 
poUcy proved possible of adoption ; the angles of 
vision with which the British, French, Italian, and 
Japanese governments approached it were too widely 
divergent ; and the prolonged and discouraging 



126 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

course of compromise and vacillation into 
which the Powers drifted would not have been 
substantially different had it been handled by the 
Council of the League of Nations rather than by 
the Supreme Council of the Allies. A common 
European poUcy presupposes common couNictions 
and a common outlook among the leading European 
peoples. Such con\ictions and such an outlook 
have not existed since the Middle Ages and do not 
exist to-day ; and it is not in the power of any 
political organization, however perfectlj^ planned, 
to create them. 

As a substitute, then, for the old Concert of the 
Powers the League has proved a disappointment. 
A standing organ of European, and still more, of 
world poUcy, working upon an agreed and consistent 
basis of principle, is as impracticable to-day as it 
proved after 1S15. Policies will continue to be 
shaped and co-operations and understandings to be 
concerted as during the last four centuries, as the 
need arises for adjusting inevitable disagreements, 
in this or that centre of state sovereignty, in London, 
Paris, BerUn, Rome, Prague, Tokio, Washington, 
and Buenos Aires, rather than in the spacious 
Council chamber that looks out over the Lake of 
Rousseau and Byron. To have imagined otherwise 
was to ignore the hmitations of the human imagina- 
tion and to forget that, in the closest analogue which 
exists to the compreliensive design of a League of 
Nations, in the British Empire, Ottawa and Mel- 
bourne and Pretoria — not to speak of Dubhn — 
have not yet learat to adjust their poUcies and 
purposes to the needs of the Commonwealth as a 
whole. 



THE OUTLOOK 127 

What prospects are involved for Europe in this 
breakdown of the League's primary function must 
be discussed later on. Let us pause to consider 
the sphere of usefulness which still lies open, under 
the existing circumstances, to President Wilson's 
creation. 

The League of Nations has four organs — ^the 
Assembly, the Council, the Court, and the Secre- 
tariat. The Assembly was designed to be an open 
forum of the intelligence and conscience of mankind, 
an expansion before a wider and less technical circle 
of the international discussions and policies of the 
Council, Despite the failure of its companion 
organ to fulfil its appointed role, it can still do most 
useful work in this field. It is true that the dele- 
gates, both of the great and the small Powers, 
come filled mainly with their own concerns, and 
that their international enthusiasm is apt to manifest 
itself mainly in matters in which their own country 
is not closely interested. Nevertheless, the debates 
are of real value and provide an opportunity, such 
as has hitherto only existed at partisan or technical 
congresses, of initiating pubUc discussion, under 
conditions where almost every point of view is 
represented, on problems which form the sub- 
stance of international controversy and the 
potential cause of future wars. Signor Tittoni, 
for instance, did the world a real service in 1920 
when he drew on himself the wrath of the Canadian 
delegation by raising the far-reaching issue of the 
international control of industrial raw materials. 
Still more valuable, perhaps, for immediate purposes, 
is the occasion provided by the Assembly meetings 
for personal contacts between the representatives, 



I2S EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

and the trained olHcials. of some forty diAerent 
countries. 

The Council has been described as a disappoint- 
ment ; but as ^Ir. B^ilfonr told the Assembly last 
September, no one can read the unadorned pages of 
its last annual report, or even scan its table of 
contents, without feeling tliat, if it is not doing 
the work for which it was designed, it ]\as already 
made itself indispensable by the numerous other 
tasks which it, and it alone, has been able to imder- 
take. Genenil Smuts and the authors of the British 
draft of the Co\env\nt. and presumably also President 
Wilson, intended it to be a standing Conference of 
Prime Ministers similar to the British Imperial 
Conference. This plan was thwarted, whether 
wittingly or not. from the moment that the League 
of Nations Contmission agret\i to admit four repre- 
sentatives of lesser states to membei'^hip of the 
Council. It does not require great politiciil experi- 
ence to imdei^tand that confidential co-ojx'ration 
between states endowed with widely differing 
measures of power and responsibility is a virtual 
impossibility. The British Imperial Conference 
did not attain to such reality as it now possesses 
until the federation of Canada and Australia and 
the union of South Africa had enabled its member- 
ship to consist of substantiiU imd responsible units 
Newfoundland remains a harmless anomaly, but 
four Newfoundlands sitting at a table with four 
Great Britviins would go far to rob the proceedings 
of reality. If the greater Allies could not bring 
themseh'es dming the war to consult their sm;Uler 
confederates, such as Serbia, on issues of policy, 
like the ItaUait Treit\-, which vitall\- al^ected 



THE OUTLOOK 129 

them, it is not to be expected that, under the 
much looser and more self-regard ing conditions 
of post-war politics, the Great Powers will jnit their 
cards on the table in the presence of Spain, Brazil, 
and China, or even of Belgium. The admission of 
the smaller Powers, whether it was a concession to 
principle or to camoHjlage, has certainly been an 
important, perhaps a determining factor in pre- 
venting the Council from even being allowed to 
attempt the policy-making function which was in 
the mind of its original designers. 

What is the nature of the new activities which it 
has made for itself ? It may perhaps best be 
described, in brief, as a sort of international House 
of Lords, or Conference of Elcier Statesmen. It is 
pecuharly adapted for deahng with questions which 
are, on the one hand, too tangled and political, 
too non-judiciable, to be handed over to the Court 
and, on the other, sufticiently compact, sutViciontly 
detached or detachable, from popular or party 
passion, to be remitted to an international authority 
with good hope that its judgment will be accepted 
as final. The decision to ask the Council to adjudi- 
cate on the Upper Silesian question marked a turning 
point in its development. It beckoned it away from 
the held of policy, where it can never hope to shine 
on to that intermediate region, half-judicial, half- 
political, of the processes variously known as 
negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. That there 
was a certain element of camouflage in entrusting 
the fate of a Central European province to a body 
so curiously and even accidentally composed may 
be admitted ; but the first-hand information and 
experience available at their service in the 

l£ 



130 EUROPE IX COX^^\LESCENCE 

Secretariat and elsewhere no doubt seived to supple- 
ment the knowledge, witliout impairing the detach- 
ment, of the Belgian. Bnuili^m. Chinese, iuul Spanisli 
representatives who were asked to draw up the lii-st 
i^eport for their more immediatel}' interested 
colleagues. 

Of the Court, now tmally constituted, httle need 
be said. Its acti\ities covex the sphere of questions 
either directly remitted to it as justiciable or refeiTcd 
to it automatically as a result of dehnite treaty 
agieements. This sphere does not as yet include 
the larger and deeper issues which still di\ide the 
leading peoples and gxoupings of m.uikind. To take 
but a single instance, there is on the new Bench 
but one representative of the Far Eastern and none 
of the Indium or African peoples. Even if therefore 
it were able to dehver. on some issue of the colour 
question, the just est judgment which the wit of 
man could devise, what hope is there that the 
non-white peoples would bow w ilhngly before such 
a decision ? The deepest issues which arise between 
nation and nation, race and race, as between 
indi\'idual men and women, transcend the power 
of judge and couit. of ride and precedent, to deter- 
mine. This is not to decry the prestige or authority 
of the new creation, which tills an important and 
indeed indispensable place in the organized himian 
scheme, but only to remind the ide.dists, alwa^'s 
apt to court disillusionment by pitching their 
concrete expectations too high, that politics are but 
tlie outward and o\'er-simphtied expression of deep- 
Ij-ing passions and traditions which have not j*et 
been touched and transfigured by the harmonizing 
power of human reason. 



THE OUTLOOK 131 

But by far the most hopeful and vital creation 
of the authors of the Covenant is the Secretariat. 
For the first time in human history there is a body 
of men, drawn from the peoples and races of five 
continents, dedicated to the service, not of this or 
that state or sectional grouping, but of mankind 
To have created an International Civil Service, 
animated, as this is, by a single world-purpose, is 
a greater achievement by far than to have estabhshed 
an International Court of Justice ; for a Court can 
only adjudicate on what is submitted to it, whilst 
an administrative service, with the health, the 
transport, and a number of other vital and complex 
but relatively non-contentious matters under its 
charge, works on steadily and quietly day by day, 
weaving into a single and harmonious pattern the 
great permanent common interests of mankind. At 
last the res puhlica, the Commonwealth of Man, 
has the ministering spirits at its service, for the lack 
of which men in their separate groupings have 
waged an unequal fight through the ages against 
disease and distance and ignorance and many another 
inveterate enemy of mankind. Whatever may be 
the fate of the Assembly, whether it perfects 
its organization by the inclusion of the United 
States, Germany, and Russia or whether it becomes 
more and more a purely European and West Asiatic 
body, supplemented by similar regional groupings 
in America and elsewhere, there can be no doubt 
that the Secretariat, hke the Court, even more than 
the Court, must and will remain as an indispensable 
instrumentality of world-wide co-operation and 
administration. 

How then, in the absence of a League of Nations 



132 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

or a Holy Alliance, are the collective affairs of 
Europe to be regulated ? Wluit is it that takes the 
place, in post-war Europe, of the pre-war Concert 
of the Powers ? In order to answer this question 
in the present, and to suggest an answer for the 
future, a frank and somewhat detailed discussion 
is needed. 

The control of Einopean poUcy. in so far as it is 
collectively controlled at all. has been vested since 
the armistices, and is still vested, in the Supreme 
Council of the Allies. This body, which has lasted 
on from the war periods, is composed of the Prime 
Ministei-s of Britain, France, and It.Uy, the three 
^'ictorious out of the four remaining European 
Great Powers, together, since last June, with an 
American ' observer.' It meets at irregular intervals, 
now in Paris, now in London, now at S. Re mo, or 
on the French Rixiera, generally when some definite 
question, or group of questions, relating to the Peace 
Treaties is in urgent need of settlement. During 
the intervals between these meetings the execution 
of its decisions, and the settlement of any lesser 
questions that may arise, is in the lumds of a Council 
of the Ambassadoi-s of the same three Powers, 
which has its seat in Paris. In so far, therefore, 
as this fragmentary and pro\*isional European 
Concert has any standing organ at all. it is to be 
found in the Council of Ambassadors ; and it is 
to this body, for instance, and not to the League 
of Nations (which is only concerned with the Peace 
Treaties in cases where definite tasks have been 
remitted to it, as with Danzig and the Saar Basin) 
that the Czecho-Slovak government, always so 
scrupulously correct, addressed its commmiidtions 



THE OUTLOOK 133 

drawing attention to the disturbed conditions in the 
Austro-] lungarian fionticr lands. 

But it is only by courtesy that the Supreme 
Council, in its present form, can be described as a 
true Concert, or a European authority at all. Its 
shortcomings in this respect are manifest. To 
begin with, it lives on simply by the momentum 
of the war-period, which is visibly giving out as the 
memory of the great common struggle grows dim. 
It is based neither on a written alliance or agreement 
nor on any clear common aim, policy, or outlook. 
Its declared purpose is indeed to watch over the 
execution of the Treaties negotiated, or rather 
dictated under its auspices. But the three partners 
are at one neither as regards the importance to 
be attached to the strict observance of the various 
Treaties nor as to the sanctions to be applied in case 
of default. Their association during the past three 
years has been a study in contrasts rather than in 
harmony ; and, so far from exhibiting to the rest 
of Europe, and especially to the newly-created 
states, the spectacle of an unsclhsh and responsible 
co-operation in the interests of the Continent as a 
whole, it has made all the world aware of the pro- 
found differences of outlook and interest which 
render such a co-operation, under present conditions 
of leadership at any rate, an unattainable ideal. 
It is between Britain and France, in particular, that 
these differences have come to a head, for Italy is 
less closely concerned with the problems of the 
German Treaty which form the main substance of 
controversy. The two Powers have drifted, after 
a long course of argument and recrimination, into 
a condition of mutual distrust and ill-temper which, 



134 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

although confined indeed to comparatively limited 
circles in each, is none the less a serious menace both 
to the two peoples themselves and to the stability 
of Europe. 

For, if Anglo-French co-operation is merely a 
provisional arrangement, without any written 
sanction, to back it up, it is nevertheless the main, 
indeed almost the only effective authority which 
is available at this moment to maintain the pre- 
carious stnicture of Eiu-opean peace. No one who 
has travelled in Central and Eastern Europe can 
doubt that, were a definite rupture to occur between 
the two countries, the effect would be immediately 
disastrous. It would give new hope to reactionary 
elements throughout the Continent, in Berlin and 
Munich, in Reichenberg and Zagreb, in Buda- 
Pesth and Sofia ; and it would almost certainly 
be followed by a concerted attempt to alter by 
force the territorial arrangements established in 
the Peace Treaties. EngUsh hberals who, \rith 
traditional naivete and want of imagination, imagine 
that they are serxing the cause of European peace 
by rating and scolding a tender and susceptible 
neighbour, might pause to reflect, before the wound- 
ing adjective slips off their pen, that it is the associa- 
tion between Britain and France, and that alone, 
which protects Europe at this moment from a con- 
tinuance of the agelong racial struggle between the 
German and Magyar and Slav and Roumanian for 
which so many reckless spirits are tliirsting from 
the Rhine to the Carpatliians and the Adriatic. 
Not that the Supreme Council is all-powerful. It 
has proved powerless to protect Armenia, or to 
coeice Russia, or to prevent the outbreak of a fresh 



THE OUTLOOK 135 

war between Greece and Turkey, or to eject 
Zeligowski from Vilna. Its effective authority 
extends only over Western and Central Europe 
and suffers palpable diminution in proportion as it 
attempts to move eastward, beyond the range where 
French miUtary power or the pressure of a British 
blockade can exercise effective compulsion. Never- 
theless, hmited though its authority may be, far 
more limited than it would have been had Eastern 
Europe been bound to the West by a firm link of 
international credit-power, it suffices in present 
circumstances to maintain a provisional stability 
and to give the new Europe, the Europe of the 
Treaties, time to harden and crystallize. 

Before asking how a true concert can be formed 
or reshaped, let us glance for a moment at this 
new Europe. Three features strike the eye at once. 
Firstly, the old multi-national Empires, Austria- 
Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, have disappeared, 
if in the last case only temporarily, from the 
European scene. Secondly, the European states 
correspond, not indeed perfectly but far more 
completely than before the war, to the lines of 
demarcation between nation and nation, the change 
bringing into existence no less than six wholly new 
states, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, 
Esthonia, and Finland, and three which are virtually 
new creations, Jugo-Slavia, Austria, and Hungary. 
Thirdly, with the diminution in the number and 
authority of the Great Powers, what may be called 
the medium-sized Powers, substantial units of 
territory such as Poland and Jugo-Slavia, or highly 
developed industrial regions such as Belgium 
and Czecho-Slovakia are destined to exercise a 



136 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

considerably greater relative influence than under 
the old pre-war conditions. In 10)14 (excluding Lilli- 
putian communities like Monaco) there were nineteen 
sovereign states in Europe, out of which six were 
Great Powers ; to-day there ai'e twenty-five, with 
four Great Powers, including Germiuiy, whose 
efi[ecti^•e mihtary and economic power is subject 
to numerous disabilities. 

How is this Europe bound together ? Three 
different imd, in some degree, competing sets of 
arrangements are at present regulating the mutual 
relations of its members. In the first place, there 
is the Covenant of the League of Nations which 
the overwhelming majority of the European states 
are pledged to observe. Under this they are bound, 
firstly not to make war upon one another NNithout 
recourse to a procedure involving pubhcity and 
delay ; secondly to take some action (not necessarily 
either mihtary or economic) to preserve the terri- 
torial integrity and independence of their fellow- 
members. Under present conditions, when the 
League has as yet had httle chance to acquire either 
the moral authority or the economic leverage which 
it may hope to wield in future years, these obhgations 
do not constitute so weighty a factor as they should 
in the hfe of Europe ; and recent discussions, at 
\\'ashington as at Cannes, and in East Central 
Eiurope, have shown how states, anxious for their 
seciuity, exhibit a preference for regional agree- 
ments, however weak the obhgation involved in 
them, over the widely scattered guarantees afforded 
by Article X. No case has indeed as yet occurred 
in Europe, as it has in Central America, in which 
two members of the League, completel}- immindful 



THE OUTLOOK 137 

of the Covenant, have actually embarked upon 
regular hostilities with one another ; but the 
recent boundary dispute between Jugo-Slavia and 
Albania, whatever the character of the fighting, 
did not fall far short of this. Already, however, 
weak and necessitous states like Austria have become 
painfully dependent on the good graces of the 
League, and, if the projected credit scheme takes 
shape, it may prove to be an agency of potential 
pressure as well as of relief, and thus arm the League 
with some rough kind of sanction or control. But 
this, of course, will, at best, be true only of the 
smaller and more helpless members of what, despite 
the boasted doctrine of the Equality of Sovereign 
States, is in reality destined to be either an aristo- 
cracy of the Great, or a bourgeoisie of the larger and 
medium-sized Powers. For a true international 
democracy, in the sense of a regime of equal con- 
sideration for all states irrespective of their size and 
strength, we must wait until force, whether pohtical 
or economic, has been ehminated from the field of 
international dealing. 

The second set of arrangements are the Peace 
Treaties, which, despite the arbitrary manner in 
which they were presented for signature to the 
enemy states, regulate so large a number of matters 
in the life of the recent belligerents, from armies 
and frontiers to waterways and labour conditions, 
as to be not undeserving of the description, recently 
applied to them by a Czecho-Slovak statesman, as 
the charter of the new Europe. They are indeed 
open to serious criticism, in their economic rather 
than in their territorial clauses ; but the most 
important defect, or Umitation, in their scope, from 



I3S EUROPE IX CONVALESCENCE 

the point of \'ie\v which we are now considering, 
is that, ap.ui from the clauses in the Covenant to 
which alhision has just been made, they make no 
adequate provision for their own continuing 
enforcement. 

It is this which has led to the third set of airange- 
ments, those embod\ing detinite treaty obhgations 
between sepvorate Powers. The most important of 
these is one which, just because it never giew from 
being a project of a Treaty into being a Treaty, 
forms the most striking illustration of the problem 
which it was designed to meet — the Treaty proposed 
by Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson to 
^L Clemenceau as a giiarantee against an unprovoked 
German aggxession. \\"hen the joint gu.u'antee 
broke do\Mi owing to non-ratihcation by the United 
States, and Britain declared herself unable to 
assume the burden alone. France turned elsewhere 
and concluded a con\-ention with Belgiimi wliich 
fonns at the moment the sole assured international 
miUtary protection of her oft-invaded Eastern 
frontier. Parallel to this, as a sanction of tlie 
Austrian, as the Franco-Belgian Treaty is of the 
Gennan settlement, are the pohtical and miUtary 
arrangements concluded between C-zecho-Slovakia, 
Jugo-Skwia, and Roumania. collectively known as 
the Little Entente. Besides this, Brit.vin has a 
Treaty with Portugal, dating from long before the 
war. and Czecho-Slovakia a treaty with Poland. 

Such is the present pohtical organi/.ation of 
Europe — a big mihnished design, supplemented, and 
in part replaced, by patchwork improvization. \Miat 
is the outlook for the future ? In what direction 
are we to look for a consistent and compreliensive 



THE OUTLOOK 139 

alteration in what must be now admitted to be an 
impracticable design ? 

The present writer beUeves that a solution of 
these perplexities and complications can be found 
in one way alone, along the simple and well-tried 
road of the old Concert of the European Powers. 
Europe has not been saved from the West, nor yet 
from the East, as was hoped by two opposing sets 
of idealists. America and Russia, each in their 
own way, may yet return to play their part in the 
life of the old Continent. For present purposes, 
however, we must rule them out. Europe will be 
wise to adapt to her own case the old Italian motto : 
Europa fara da se. She must look to her own 
heahng. Then perchance others, who seem at 
present to look on, kindly but unhelpful, from afar 
will find the will and the means to co-operate. And 
the healing must begin where the wound is deepest, 
from the Western end of the Continent, The goal 
of all good Europeans at this juncture should be 
to work for the establishment of relations of mutual 
confidence between Britain, France, and Germany. 

If this can be achieved, Europe will recuperate 
her strength in security and the League of Nations 
will find the main obstacle to its growth removed 
and will deepen its roots and spread its branches. 
Let the ideaUsts who pin their faith to the League, 
and the realists who make hght of it because they 
know how powerless any mere organization must 
ever be to combat the fears and suspicions which 
still poison the life of Europe, join hands in attempt- 
ing to solve what has been the major problem of 
European politics during the last three years, and 
during the fifty years which preceded them. 



140 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

It is not an insoluble problem. All three nations, 
indeed, if they could give expression to their deepest 
thought, desire ardently and wholeheartedl}- to 
solve it. Especially is this true of the two most 
closely interested of the three peoples, who, in their 
broad masses at any rate, are weary of the eternal 
vicissitudes of armed conflict which have clouded 
their serenity and worn out their energies ever 
since Ccesar encountered the German chieftain 
from across the Rhine. It is not the desire for a 
solution that is lacking — it is the understanding — 
the mutual understanding of moods and motives, 
of deep-lying passions and unspoken philosophies 
which alone can bring harmony into the relations 
of two anguished and tortured peoples. If the 
dithculty were superficial, it could be easily solved, 
and might as easily recur. Just because it is agelong 
and uiN-eterate, compounded of traditional passions 
and of ancient and recent sufferings, it needs a 
deeper anal\*sis for its healing. But it is precisely 
because, as a result of the war, such an luialysis is 
at last possible, because submerged dispositions have 
become manifest and hidden fears have been justified 
by horrid facts, that such a heahng is at last within 
the range of practical pohtics. 

Let us look first at the case of France, for a 
right understanding of her nature is the master key 
to the problem. " France has lost ground with 
both British and American opinion at Paris," wrote 
two yeai^s ago an English obser\'er who had unusual 
opportunities for witnessing the work of the Paris 
Conference from within, " but the fault lies largely 
with us. If by lack of understimding we fail 
to evoke French genius and French poUtical 



THE OUTLOOK 141 

imagination in building up the new Europe, no other 
gains that we may make, not even, if we may pause 
to underline the thought implicit behind the words, 
a perfected League of Nations or a firm union of 
the English-speaking peoples, can compensate us for 
that supreme loss."* The statement, or rather the 
prediction, here expressed has been only too painfully 
fulfilled. During the last three years Britain and 
America, more particularly Britain, have not under- 
stood, have seemed not even to be trying to under- 
stand, the mind or mood of France. As a result, 
France, discouraged and resentful, has failed to exert 
her incomparable gifts of interpretation and under- 
standing in the building up of the new Europe. And, 
as a further result, we see the Europe that we see, a 
ship adrift in heavy seas, with no visible helmsman. 
Why does not France join wholeheartedly in the 
Anglo-Saxon project of the League of Nations ? 
Why is she a perpetual obstacle to policies and pro- 
posals, such as a general measure of military and naval 
disarmament or the admission of Germany to the 
League of Nations, which seem, to the British mind, 
normal and necessary steps towards the recuperation 
and stabiUzation of Europe ? The answer maj'^ be 
given in three words, fear, indignation, and suspicion. 
Twice invaded within fifty years, France fears for 
the security of her Eastern frontier. Watching the 
trend of recent British policy towards Germany, 
which seems to her, and to her not alone on the 
Continent, a nauseating compound of sentimentahty 
and commercialism, and confronted with the nerve- 
racking spectacle of her own rav-aged departments, 
she is driven by reaction to evoke and cherish, as a 

* Tht Rt»ponsibilitiis of tht League, by Eu3tac« Percy, p. 135. 



142 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

possession not now to be shaiod with her former 
Allies, the nionil indignation which to her sensitive 
spirit is no more than a jnst and necessary tribnte 
to the heroic dead. Fin.illy, faced with the dis- 
illusionment resiilthig from the constitutional 
complexities of American and the opponunist 
Nicissitudes of present-day British poUtical hfe, her 
contidence in the English-speaking peoples has 
been nidel\' shaken and the old seed of suspicion 
of Per fide Albion has once more found a lodgment 
in her mind. Find the means to allay that feai", open 
a broad Em'opean clumnel for that noble indignation, 
remove tlie nmkling causes of that poisonous 
mistnist. and France will once more resume her 
nonnal place and poise as the nKun element of 
reason and haniiony and proportion in the many- 
sided hfe of the European peoples. 

How can that fear be allayed ? The remedy 
hes \\'ith Britain, and it is not hard to find. Not 
once but m.my times during the last three years 
have Britisli statesnien ;ind editoi-s. safely ensconced 
behind their maritime ramparts, aimed with a na\'al 
pR"'dominance any discussion of which was ruled 
out of the agenda of the Peace Conference before- 
luind, assured France that her fears were groundless 
and upbraided her for " nervousness " or even for 
" militarism."" Granted that French fears are a 
hallucination, assurances proffered under such con- 
ditions are calculated ratlier to exasperate than to 
allay it. If Britain sincerely desires to remove the 
gnaNnng feai" at the heart of Fnuice. she must not 
merely tell her old Ally that she has no need to fear, 
but t.ike action to prove it. Up to the present such 
action as slie has taken has seemed to tlie logical 



THE OUTLOOK 143 

French mind directly to belie her assurances. When 
France asked that the Rhine should be made the 
permanent military frontier of Germany, Britain 
and America refused and offered instead a joint 
guarantee against an unprovoked Cierman attack. 
When the American guarantee failed to mature 
owing to the action of the Senate, Britain refused 
to undertake the burden alone. Why did she do 
so ? No doubt the British Premier had his own 
reasons, which, whether creditable or otherwise, are 
readily intelligible to anyone familiar with the 
course of British politics. But to the French mind 
the refusal to undertake the burden of the AlUance 
could only mean that Britain, whatever her assur- 
ances, regarded a new Franco-German war as a 
contingency not altogether unhkely to take place. 
And French statesmen point out, with some justice, 
that, as a result of a war in which France has 
suffered, and suffered horribly, from an unprovoked 
aggression by an enemy against whom she and her 
friends were insuHiciently guarded, she is left with 
even less assurances of support from Britain than 
she had before. In 1914 her Eastern frontier was 
protected, firstly by the neutrality of Belgium, of 
which Britain was an individual guarantor, and 
secondly, less expHcitly, by the Grey-Cambon 
understanding. To-day Belgium is no longer 
neutralized ; the British obligation towards Belgium 
has fallen to the ground, and Britain has no obhga- 
tions towards France other than the vague and 
insubstantial commitments embodied in the Cove- 
nant of the League of Nations. To the French 
mind, trained, alas, by experience to measure 
co-operation not in rhetorical assurances of good 



144 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

will but in army corps and mobilization orders, the 
League of Nations is not enough. Britain and 
France are at least alike in this, that they both 
prefer a double lock to their door. There are very 
few Enghshmen, certainly not enough to form a 
majority in any constituency, who would sleep 
soundly in their beds if the Covenant, and not the 
Navy also, were the protection of their island- 
fortress. France, with a more vivid and poignant 
experience of invasion than a few scratches from 
sea or air, is only asking for the same double system 
of insurance. If we beUeve, as others beheve of 
ours, that her demands are superfluous, that is 
surely all the more reason for acceding to them. A 
declaration of British readiness to sign the Guarantee 
Treaty would be the best possible answer to French, 
and it may be added also to Belgian, fears. Surely 
it is not too much to ask that after their peculiarly 
intimate association in the greatest war in history, 
the marks of which remain indehble on French soil, 
France and Britain should be bound together, under 
the aU-embracing aegis of the League of Nations, 
by a pact recognized as constituting as fixed and 
natural and stabihzing an influence in the European 
scheme as the old association between Britain and 
Portugal. Such a guarantee would differ from the 
old-world diplomatic combinations to which excep- 
tion is rightly taken by the definiteness of its terms 
and the hmited scope of its obhgations. It would 
not be available, hke an ordinary alliance, as a 
means for covering ambitious designs by one of the 
parties in this or that region of the world, or as a 
support to selfish economic poHcies ; and those who 
argue that, in the sphere covered by its obligations, 



THE OUTLOOK 145 

the distinction between defence and " aggression " 
may in practice be difficult to draw, would find a 
convincing answer to their fears if they were better 
acquainted with the true attitude of France. She 
seeks no new gains or adventures on her Eastern 
frontier. All she seeks is to hold what she has won 
and to guard her own territory. He httle knows 
either the French peasant or the French townsman 
who thinks that aggression, whether open or con- 
cealed, against Germany, need ever be feared from 
their country. The guarantee, therefore, so far 
from dividing Europe into opposing diplomatic 
camps, would be a true security, not only for peace, 
but for serenity of mind, and would promote, rather 
than impede, the establishment of a tripartite 
understanding ; for the security of the German 
Republic against the militarist hotheads who still 
seek to wreck it depends upon the stability of the 
new governments in East Central Europe, and upon 
the Entente of the Great Pov/ers which created 
them. Britain, France, and the New Germany have 
a compelling common interest, of which the wiser 
heads are everywhere aware, in the stabilization of 
the settlement and in the discouragement of policies 
of adventure or revenge. In any case, however, 
whether the pact is signed or not, France may rest 
assured that the association, of which the Guarantee 
would be the formal expression, exists already in the 
hearts of thousands of individual members of the 
two countries, who will carry their sense of mutual 
comradeship and obligation with them to the grave. 

Such a declaration need not be unconditional. 
It could be coupled with a general policy of dis- 
armament. British statesmen have repeatedly laid 

Ke 



146 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

stress on the efficacy of the disarmament clauses 
of the German Treaty, and, despite occasional 
scares, French opinion is now disposed to accept 
the same \'iew. It is common ground, at least 
between those best qualified to weigh the mihtary 
facts, that, thanks to the mihtary- commissions of 
control pro\dded for in the Treaty, Germany is for 
the present, and will bo for some ^wirs to come, 
powerless for a western aggi-ession. But this is not 
sufficient to allay French fears, still less to justify 
a substantial measure of disannament on the French 
side. France looks ahead into the futiu-e, she 
contrasts the relative population figures of the two 
countries, and she asks hei^self what is likely to 
happen when the commissions of control are dis- 
banded, when the Rhine occupation is ended, and 
when, in the course of years, a forty million France 
is once more face to face, this time without British 
or American support, against a seventy or eighty 
million Germany. Is it any wonder that she should 
look eastwards, among the Slav peoples, or even to 
Africa, for the support so ungenerously, as she thinks, 
withheld her from the ^^'est ? Here again it is fear, not 
" imperiahsm," which has led to manifestations of 
French activity, at ^^'arsaw and elsewhere, which 
have served to deepen the estrangements between 
Paris and London. France feels that the same wil- 
fully uncomprehendingly British policy, the same 
aggravatingly self-righteous professions of correcti- 
tude, piusue her in the East, from Danzig to Upper 
Silesia, as on the Western frontier of her hereditary 
foe ; and in her nervous exasperation she puts herself 
even more in the VTong with her impeccably cool- 
headed neighbour. 



THE OUTLOOK 147 

How can France be given security against the 
re-arming of Germany after the disbandment of the 
present miUtary commissions of control ? Firstly, 
by the Guarantee Treaty, which would definitely 
throw upon the British Government and people the 
obligation of enforcing the military clauses of the 
Treaty, especially those providing for the demili- 
tarization of the Rhine area and of taking concerted 
measures with their French Allies to secure an 
adequate margin of security. If it be urged against 
this that it might involve a change in the traditional 
British military system, the answer is that such 
an argument is itself a confession that the German 
disarmament laid down in the Treaty is likely to 
prove illusory, and that the French fears are there- 
fore justified. But it is our business, as much as 
that of France, to see that the Treaty provisions are 
maintained, and it is here that the opening is pro- 
vided for a second measure of security in the estab- 
lishment of some permanent international agency to 
keep watch over the problem of armaments. Such 
a measure is foreshadowed in two articles of the 
Covenant. Article I. lays down that every state 
admitted to membership of the League after the 
first batch of " original members," " shall accept 
such regulations as may be prescribed by the 
League in regard to its military and naval forces 
and armaments," and Article IX. provides that "a 
permanent Commission shall be constituted to 
advise the Council on the execution of Articles I. 
and VIII." (the limitation of armaments clause) 
" and on military, naval, and air questions generally." 
Such an authority would need to be equipped to 
report not only on the strictly military, but on 



148 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

industrial measures of mobilization. No European 
government, after the experience of this war, is 
likel}- to embaik on hostilities until it has amassed, 
not merely the munitions, but the industrial raw 
materials needed for a successful issue — unless, 
indeed, it is so wilfully perverse, or so bhnded by 
a desire for revenge, as deliberately to run amok. 
Secret preparations for war, therefore, except for 
an air offensive, with chemical gases, against which 
neither greater nor lesser precautions can avail, are 
even less possible than they were before 1914, when 
the intelligence departments proved to be not ill- 
informed as to the main facts. The establishment 
of some such body as that contemplated in Article 
IX. would go far to allay the apprehensions, not of 
France only, but of the other powers, such as 
Czecho-Slovakia and Jugo-Slavia, who have equal 
and even greater reason to fear possible aggression 
from untnist worthy and revengeful neighbours. It 
is true that, as became clear at Washington, a 
general programme of European military disarma- 
ment cannot be adopted until Russia has been 
brought into line, and the Hungarian situation 
gives the other Succession States more ground for 
confidence, but there is no reason why the project 
for an international commission of control should 
not be adopted independently of any subsequent 
programme of Umitation. Such a programme 
already exists in the Treaties for four European 
states. 

A third measure of security could be given by 
Britain to France by the perfecting, within the 
limits lately agreed upon as legitimate, of the 
offensive activities of our sea-power. If Frenchmen 



THE OUTLOOK 149 

habitually look to British divisions rather than to 
British destroyers as the effective instrument of 
common defence, every German knows that it is the 
British Navy which, in the last analysis, has the 
stranglehold over his country's life . There is no doubt 
in any Englishman's mind that were France once 
more to be the victim of an unprovoked attack, such 
power would be used to the full. But it is not 
enough that the power should be there in reserve. 
Both the French and the Germans, and, let it be 
added, their recently neutral neighbours, should be 
made to realize that it is there, and that it is meant 
to be used. The course of Allied policy has led the 
pubUc opinion, not only of the three countries most 
closely interested but of the rest of the world also, 
to think that military power, and in the main French 
military power, is the only available sanction against 
Treaty-breaking. It is important that the role of 
the Navies, and especially of the leading European 
Navy, should not be forgotten, and with it, let it be 
added, the poHtical responsibilities, especially in the 
domain of commercial policy, which the possession 
of such inexorable power involves. The reader who 
has followed the underlying argument of the earlier 
part of this volume will not need to be told that the 
British Navy is like a magnet set up to draw Germany 
steadily towards a westward orientation and to 
forbid her to indulge in eastern adventures in which, 
though she may conquer whole kingdoms, she risks 
the loss of her connections with the overseas world 
and of the indispensable elements of civilization and 
livehhood which it provides for her population. 

The system of regional agreements for mutual 
protection between naval powers lately inaugurated 



ISO EUROrE IX CONVALESCENCE 

at XN'asliiiigton s^hoiild be extended to European 
Nvatei~s. with whicli Washington was powerless to 
de.U. Were tliis done, and M.Uta, Tunis, and Tripoli 
brought within a pact similar to that which now 
includes AustnUia. Fonnosa. and the Philippines, 
tlie memory of a i-eceait unseemly wrangle at Wash- 
ington would be obliterated, and the chief obstacle 
to a comprehexisi\-e naval disarmament removed. 

So much for French fears. We pass now to a 
more subtle and intimate subject, the moral in- 
dignation which estranges the xictim from the 
wrongdoer. The remedy here lies m^iinly on the 
German side ; but thei^e is something that a\n be 
said in this place. Perhaps the greatest of all the 
many psychologic.il barriers to Fruico-Britisli under- 
standing is the contrast between what the Enghsli 
are fond of calling *' sport sm.uisliip " on the one 
hand, and French sensitiveness on the other. The 
rough, good-humoured, optinustic, and imperceptive 
attitude towards life which caused the Britisli 
soldier to endow his Cjerm;ui foe, in the opposing 
trenches, with the innocuous title of Fritz is, ajid 
renivains more th;m ever after live yeai^ of com- 
radesJiip, a mystery to the intense and deeply 
patriotic poiUi, who sees in the Boche tlie barbarian 
invader and deftler of his home. It may be said 
at once, of the Enghsh imd the French, as of the 
EngUsli and the Irisli, tliat tlie fonner aie apt to 
forget what it were better to remember and the 
latter to rememlvr what it were better to forget. 
But tlie Frendi have an especial spur to memory 
which is denied to their more obli\ious neighlx">urs. 
The growth of a kindly, or even a cahii, sentiment 
between tlie mass of the French and German peoples 



THE OUTLOOK 151 

is perpetually impeded and lliiown back by the 
spectacle of the devastated regions. The invaded 
departments are too closely Unked with the rest of 
the life of France, both sentimentally and in- 
dustrially, for the wound to exert a merely local 
influence and reaction. The children growing up 
amid the ruins of Rheims and Arras or in the damp 
and draughty shanties which stand for home in 
Lens and Albert and Bapaumc and hundreds of 
equally obliterated vilhiges will bear about with 
them througli life the indelible memories of suffering 
and squalor im])rinted on tlieir infant sensibilities. 
Nor, in a land like France where the tradition of 
the soil and the liomcstead counts for so much in 
the heart and mind both of peasant and townsman, 
are the uprooted victims of the invader, transplanted 
to Lyons or the Loire or even to the all-engulfing 
metropohs, to be reckoned in happier case. For 
such a wound no real healing is possible. Rheims 
Cathedral, the Town Hall Square of Arras, like the 
Cloth Hall of Ypres, have passed for ever into 
history, even as the heroes who defended them. 
But at least there can be reparation, so that new 
Ufe may spring up to replace the old and the busy 
hand of man once more reawaken and revivify the 
desolate tract which for four long years marked 
the boundary of freedom. Reparation to France 
is not only, or mainly, a financial problem. It 
embodies a demand of human justice springing 
from the depth of the French soul. When the 
British Premier, aided by his Australian colleague, 
added war-costs to the Allied claim, he was not 
simply trebUng, or even quadrupling, the total 
bill ; he was mingUng two tragically dilterent 



152 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

elements of iiati\ity. He was asking for Britain 
and Canada and Australia, for India and Portugal 
and Brazil, who had known nothing of the long- 
drawn shanie and anguish of enemy occupation, 
a share in what should have been regarded as an 
almost sacred, if inadequate, tribute of recompense 
to the innocent civiUans of the invaded lands. 
Until this aspect of the repai-ation problem, so 
deep-felt in France and j'ct so hard to state to an 
outsider, is rated at its full value both by Britain 
and Germany, the soul of France will continue to 
suffer from an outraged sense of what is, at bottom, 
a just and noble indignation. Perhaps it may yet 
prove to be the hidden blessing in the ghastly 
tragedy of Oppau that its crumbled ruins and its 
giant crater, with their stream of stricken refugees, 
may bring home to dwellers b}- the Rhine scenes 
on the Somme and the Aisne, the Lys and the Yser, 
which their imaginations had hitherto been too 
weak to picture. 

The third element in what, to use the technical 
language of analysis, we ma}- term the French 
complex, is a pervading and poisoning misti*ust. 
Here it is best to be frank. howe\er distasteful 
the task may be. For the last three years, ever 
since the peace discussions began, French statesmen 
have been engaged in constant and intricate negotia- 
tions with the British Piemier. The result of 
these pei"sonal contacts is that Mr. Lloyd George, 
to quote the words of an unusuiiUy balanced, if 
plain spoken, British journalist, " is hated in 
France as no EngUshman has ever been hated,"* 
This hatred is not due primaril}' to differences of 
' NfU' Staiaman, September 34, i^n 



THE OUTLOOK 153 

policy. Such differences have indeed, during the 
last year at any rate, been rather the result than 
the cause of the personal difficuHy. It is due to 
the mistrust and the bcwiklcrniont caused by the 
tactics of a politician who seems consistently to 
violate the rules hitherto associated by the French 
mind with British statesmanship. Had a British 
statesman of the old type, a Gladstone, a Salisbury, 
or even a Milner — the Milner who was brave enough, 
in October, 1918, to issue the warning against the 
disintegrating possibilities of a German revolution — 
been in oflice at the time of the armistice, the con- 
flict of policy and temperament would have been 
acute ; but France would have known where she 
stood, and would have received from Britain what 
she expected, the hrm and sympathetic guidance of 
a generous friend. But to have been led by British 
statesmansliip along the path of violence and 
revenge, and then to have watched the treacherous 
guide, his own immediate objectives attacked, 
craftily tiu'ning on his old tracks and making for 
the enemy's camp, has proved too exasperating to 
French sensibihty. It must unfortunately be set 
down, if not as an axiom at least as a preponderant 
likehhood, that no real improvement in Anglo-French 
relations can be looked for till there is a change 
in the British premiership. The same is true, let 
it be stated at once, of Anglo-German relations 
also. To the French pubUc Mr. Lloyd George is 
the man who, having engaged to try the Kaiser 
and to exact the uttermost farthing from the 
Boche, has pocketed most of the German colonies 
and German merchant fleet for his country, and 
put Britain's chief opposing Navy and chief trade 



154 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

competitor out of the way, and has then left France, 
uncompensated and imsupported, with a paper 
Treaty as her chief asset. To the German pubhc he 
is and remains the man who, ha\ing declared, under 
circumstances of unusual solemnity, that the war 
was being waged against Prussian militarism and 
not against the future of tlie German people, and 
ha\ing pledged liis coimtry to make peace upon the 
Wilson basis, is responsible for a Treaty which 
completely ignores the " equality of trade condi- 
tions " pro\'ided for in the Fourteen Points and 
wiped out, generally to the ad\antage of Britain, 
what Germans regarded as the elejnentary legal 
rights of their traders abroad. For the wrong 
done to Gennany before the Treaty was signed, 
and the wTong done to France since, the British 
Premier will not easily be forgiven from either side ; 
on this at least the victims of blockade and invasion 
are ahke agreed. 

^^'e are not concerned in this volume with personal 
questions except when, as in this case, they have 
an important bearing on European poUcy. Da\id 
Lloyd George the man may be left to the biographers, 
who wiU do justice, one may be sure, to the energy 
and resom'cefulness, the unquenchable \itahty 
and the almost imcanny powers of receptiveness, 
intuition, and impro\ization which go together to 
make up what, but for no added touch of greatness, 
would imdoubtedly deserve the name of genius. 
Greatness indeed, and goodness too, lay at his roots, 
and were nourished by his early ^^'elsh upbringing. 
But when the soil was changed the plant, for all its 
appearance of adaptabihty, seems to have lost the 
best of its native quahty. Students of Wales may 



THE OUTLOOK 155 

see in the Premier, not the " greatest Uving Welsh- 
man," but a symbol of the tragedy of their country. 
Students of Europe cannot look so deep. They 
can only take regretful note that one who might 
have lived in history for service rendered in a plastic 
hour, made the Great Refusal and so effaced himself 
from the scene. 

We may now pass on from France to her eastern 
neighbour. The case of Germany is graver, but 
less subtle and complex than that of France. She, 
too, endured greatly for four years and more and 
emerged from the war nerve-racked, exhausted, 
and in need of guidance. But whereas the problem 
for France was to heal the wounds of body and 
mind so as to be free to pick up the threads of her 
old hfe, whether in the fields or in the arts, the 
problem for Germany is to find a new way of hfe 
altogether. Germany is the victim of a complete 
breakdown — a bankruptcy of all that to which 
her people had been, or thought they had been, 
attached for fifty years. For the German, both 
by temperament and by added training, sees his 
hfe and the hfe of society, as part of a general 
scheme or philosophy ; and when the fabric of 
Bismarck collapsed, its whole inteUectual and moral 
foundations were involved in the ruin. At the 
impact of a fact like the Bulgarian armistice into 
the ordered scheme of his historical thinking, the 
successor of Treitschke readjusted his whole mental 
furniture, and the sincerest spokesman of the old 
order, Friedrich Naumann, told the parents of the 
dead that their sons had fallen to close an epoch, 
and that a new age demanded new tasks and a new 
outlook. So much he was privileged to see before 



156 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

a merciful death removed him from the scene. His 
coimtr\Tiien as yet have seen no further. If the 
question be asked, \Mnther is Genn;uiy tending? 
the answer is. No whither. She is still too much 
stupefied and bewildered by the catastrophe which 
has befallen her to have taken her bearings or laid 
out a new track. The older generation, and the 
more obstinate and embittered among the young, 
are indeed harking back to the old banners ; but, 
as the Kapp Putsch and recent events since the 
murder of Erzberger have shown, they no longer 
possess the power to lead them to xictor}', unless 
some large European change, such as a rupture 
between France and Britain, should open the way. 
But the mass are RepubUcans. They accept the 
new order. They recognize its ine\Titability and 
its power over their hves. But they have as 3'et 
discovered no intellectual or poUtical initiation of 
their own. Not, indeed, that their lack of con- 
\'iction is due to a failure to experiment with new 
philosophies. In the autumn of 1918 and through 
the early \nnter, until it became clear that the 
AUies were letting the economic situation go by 
default, all Gennany was Wilsonian and the Four- 
teen Points were quoted and commentarized as 
though ^^'ashington were a new Sinai. Later on, 
in the desperation of a workless winter when the 
blockade, so far from being relaxed, was even 
extended to the Baltic, the Bolshevik philosophy 
had its brief day of intellectual vogue. But the 
failure of the Munich experiment, coupled with 
more detailed news as to the actual situation at 
Moscow, soon shepherded the inquiring flock away 
from these dangerous pastures. Since then, 



THE OUTLOOK 157 

compromise and political improvization have been the 
order of the day. But if the German is still doubt- 
ful as to what he shall think, he has found relief in 
the renewed power of work. Every month puts 
the blockade and its privations further behind 
him ; while, raw materials once purchased somehow, 
the exchange rate has facilitated the resumption of 
export to a degree exceeding all expectations of 
two years ago. When one of the earliest British 
writers to visit Germany after the publication of 
the peace terms declared that the Treaty gave 
Britain the power to " control the world's com- 
merce," he little thought that within two years 
there would be far more unemployed in his own 
country than in Germany.* 

So far, then, as ingrained German dispositions 
are concerned, there is no reason in the nature of 
things why the German Republic should not put 
the whole Wilhelmian tradition, with its methods 
and ambitions, aside as a nightmare and enter 
into relations of confidence and co-operation with 
France and Britain, particularly with France. 
Psychologically, as any observer can test for himself 
on the spot, France and Germany were intended 
to understand and not to misunderstand one another. 
Nature meant them to co-operate, not to colUde. 
The traveller who passes from the pure France, 
through the borderlands of Franco-German culture, 
whether in the redeemed provinces or in the 
temporary French area of occupation, to the pure 
Germany, is conscious, not of a clash, but of 
an agreeable blending of cultures. Alsace and 
Lorraine are not, hke Fermanagh and Tyrone, the 

' Brallsford, Across the Blockade, p. 150. 



15S EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

meeting place of iwo inutiuilly incomprehensdhles, 
nor wt like the \\'el<Qi ALvrches. where the bloiuiing, 
although no longer a ix->Iitical issue, submerges, 
rather ih.m rewMls. the Ivst of both, but the home 
of a tnie borderLmd people who. despite their French 
allegiance, now indelibly fixed, have the power to 
take in ^md to radiate fonh. in characteiistic and 
homely fas^liion, the influences whicii come to them 
from both sides. Genuany has owed much to 
Fnvnce. from the Middle -Vges onwards, and France 
in her tuni. whether in music, science, or schokir- 
sliip. has owed much, of late years even overmuch, 
to Germ.my. It is politics and politically-poisoned 
" culture," and these ;Uone. which have caused the 
tragic mismiderstatiding which both sides, and the 
world v\s a whole, have blindly accepted as an 
im;\ltenible fact in the life of Euroj-K?. 

The same, if in lesser degiw. is tnie of the relations 
betwetMi Germany and Brit.iin. If cultui\Uly the 
two ptx>ples are far apart — ^for the North Sea and 
the ClKvniiol form one of the marked cultural 
frontiers of the world — racivvlly they ha\e nuich in 
common. Racial affinities are a gcnxl foundation 
for mutUvVl intercourse. vUid it is not surprising that 
the British and AtneriCvm trooi">s in the Rhine area 
should have Ixvn pleasurably surprised to become 
aware of them. They are. however, a dangerous 
basis for political co-opt^ration. imless supplemented 
by some more conscious and definite understanding. 
The (.htViculty about the relations Ivtween Britviin 
and her late enemy at this moment is, not that there 
is a want of contact, but that superficial contacts, 
faciUtated by racial atTnuty, are making the tri- 
p.irtiie underst.UKiuig, wherein lies the only real 



THE OUTLOOK 159 

solution, more difficult of attainment and forming 
a crust, as it were, over an unhealed and envenomed 
wound. 

For tlic German disposition with which France 
and Britain have to deal is not normal, or simply 
convalescent after collapse and exhaustion, but 
abnormal and outraged, stung, like that of France, 
by a sense of justice denied and of continuing wrong. 
The publication of the draft terms of the Treaty in 
May, 191 9, put a sudden end to German Wilson- 
ianism, and to the sincere, if superficial, mood of 
receptiveness — penitence would be too strong a 
word — which accompanied it. Isolated for over 
four years from contact with the opinion of the 
outer world, Germans in the early part of 1919 were 
genuinely surprised to discover the opinion enter- 
tained about them by the mass of mankind, and 
felt conscientiously constrained to begin examining 
into its grounds. But the truth, as revealed in the four 
volumes of German Foreign Office documents, and 
in the damning and unanswerable summary of their 
contents published by Kautsky, was too terrible 
for all but the most courageous of minds to 
assimilate, and the Treaty not only gave Germans 
a substantial grievance of their own in compensation, 
but opened the door to self-justificating argument 
and ingenuity on the major issue. During the last 
two and more years, despite, or indeed because of, 
the declaration of guilt embodied in the Peace 
Treaty, German opinion has once more hardened in 
the belief, not indeed that the Allies, or any one of 
them, caused the war, but that it " just happened," 
like a disturbance of Nature, or that, at the worst, 
the responsibihty can be divided. Every kind of 



i6o EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

rationalization, to use the technical tenn which is 
applied to similar processes in individual mental 
cases, is used to support this latter contention, but 
that the patient remains unsatisfied, that the 
problem of German responsibility for the appalUng 
catastrophe remains a grim obsession in the mind 
of most thinking Germans, is manifest from the 
constant output of hterature on what is among the 
AUies now an outworn subject, and becomes still 
more e\ident to anyone who has had occasion to 
discuss the issue with Germans face to face. 

It is vital not only to the restoration of confidence 
between France and Germany, but to the healing 
of Germany herself, that the question of the responsi- 
bility for the war should not be evaded or glossed 
over with fri\-olous and repugnant amiabilities, but 
faced frankl}' in all its nakedness. It is the only 
means to the recovery of German serenity and self- 
respect, and to the restoration of a right and honour- 
able relationship between the Geniian people and 
the rest of civiUzed mankind. Nor, difficult though 
it is to pin indi\idual Germans down to this issue, 
as difficult as for a psycho-analyst to bring his 
patient to talk of his hidden wound, does it transcend 
the possibilities of sincere and S3'mpathetic inter- 
course. \\'hat is needed above all is an increase of 
personal contacts between frank, honest and patriotic 
spirits on either side, between those who understand 
what love of country means, and what anguish is 
involved for all true Germans in the thought that 
the devotion and endurance so prodigally and 
unquestioningly rendered against a world of enemies 
were spent on an evil cause. " Even if I were con- 
vinced by what you tell me," said such a true lover 



THE OUTLOOK i6i 

of the Fatherland after a frank discussion of this 
theme, " I could not say so to you." Here, on the 
ground of a common love of country, of a uniting 
and reconciling human experience, rather than in 
the empty rhetoric of cosmopolitanism, is material 
for a real restoration of confidence and even of 
friendship. Not to forget and forgive, but to \mder- 
stand and forgive, should be the watchword of both 
parties to this common effort. 

Such discussions reveal that there is a two-fold 
difficulty to be overcome. There is, firstly, the fact 
that the two sides are working from two dilferent 
versions of the historical events, the German 
version, in the writer's view, being by far the more 
distorted and incomplete, partly to the failure on 
the German side to realize the direct, in this case 
the awful, responsibility of the individual citizen 
in a modern state for the actions of his government. 
If, as the evidence from June, 1914, onwards, proves 
up to the hilt, Germany was responsible for involving 
first the Balkans, then Europe, then almost the 
whole world, in the greatest war in history, then 
the Allied peoples are right in feeling that not the 
German state but the German people, men and 
women alike, are responsible for what is rightly 
described in the AlUes' covering letter of June, 
1919, as " the greatest crime against humanity and 
the freedom of peoples that any nation, calling 
itself civilized, has ever committed." And they 
will not feel free to enter into real relations of 
confidence with their late enemies until they have 
received more than constrained and perfunctory 
indications of sorrow and remorse on the German 
side. The public occasion may yet arise when some 

Le 



i62 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

convincing indication of this kind can be given. In 
the meantime it is in the more intimate region of 
personal contacts that the reconciliation must 
begin. 

But the road to such reconciliation is impeded 
and blocked up by the injustice of which Germany 
has a right to complain in the Peace Treaty. So 
long as the German people is labouring under the 
huge liability imposed upon it by the Pensions and 
Separation Allowances clause, and under the dis- 
abilities of the economic clauses, it will be as difficult 
for Germans to feel, as for their late enemies to 
demand, an appropriate attitude of regret. The 
comparison between the two wrongs may indeed 
recall the mote and the beam, though it must be 
confessed that a sum of between three and four 
thousand million pounds, a moderate estimate of the 
liability under the clause in question, constitutes a 
pretty substantial mote. Nevertheless, until it is 
removed, Germans will continue to attribute to the 
Treaty, and to the Treaty as a whole rather than to 
its more indefensible clauses, evils which, probed to 
the bottom, are in the main the inevitable legacy of 
the war itself, and will find consolation for the 
prickings of conscience in an unwholesome attitude 
of martyrdom. 

Thus far our argument seems to have brought us 
to a deadlock. France cannot re-establish true 
relations with Germans while her wrongs remain 
unredressed ; but Germany is estopped from 
redressing them, in the only spirit in which redress 
can bring healing and appeasement, because she 
too is nursing her wrongs. It is true that, as between 
France and Germany, as between Britain and 



THE OUTLOOK 163 

Germany, there have of late been symptoms of 
rapprochement, of which the Rathenau-Loucheur 
agreement for reparation in kind is the most con- 
spicuous example. But here again the agreement, 
however desirable, has but a surface value. It 
springs rather from a common interest or inclination 
to leave Britain on one side than from a genuine 
desire to collaborate. So long as the moral atmo- 
sphere remains as it is, co-operation between France 
and Germany must remain on a purely material 
plane, capable indeed of involving Britain in a 
damaging isolation, and even of forming the nucleus 
of an anti-British, or anti-Anglo-Saxon hloc of 
Continental peoples, but not of reawakening the 
old lost sense of the moral unity of Europe. Europe, 
in fact, needs Britain, as she needed her in 1914, 
and again in the plastic hours of 191 8. Much has 
been lost, but much can still be retrieved, if Britain, 
who is in Euiope yet not of Europe, can rise to 
the height of her opportunity. 

It is the fortune, whether for good or ill, of the 
present writer to be able to see his country through 
the eyes both of his fellow-citizens and of their 
foreign critics. To have this double vision is always 
a stimulus, but there are moments when it carries 
with it a peculiar degree of responsibility — when to 
speak is perhaps to incur odium, but to keep silent 
is to be a traitor. Such a moment is the present, 
when our poUcy and the conjuncture of events have 
brought us into a situation which contains elements 
of danger, as also elements of hope, of which few 
Englishmen seem to be aware. 

There is no need to recall Britain's services to 
Europe during the war, or the spirit of unselfish 



iCm EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

aiid spoilt aiioous sacrilico in which tliev were 
rendorod. Our live million volunteers — how many 
of thorn, alvis, lost to the further service of their 
country — reveal a degree of iiKii\idual ci\ic 
responsibility which no other bcUigoreut state on 
either side can approach. Nor need it be stated, 
except for the wilfully blind or the woefully ignorant 
in other countries, that the British people, ir- 
respective of class or party, cherish the most genuine 
feelings of goodwill for the peoples of Europe and 
desire nothing better than to be helpful to them. 
If they sinned, as they did sin gi-ievously, in the 
election of 191S, it was through ignorance and bad 
leadership, not out of evil purpose ; imd could they 
be reawakened now to a consciousness of their 
awful degree of responsibility for the subsequent 
miseries of Europe, they would do all they could 
to make amends. But they have been captained 
by opportunists who have followed, not guided, 
their incluiations ; and their inclinations, during 
the past three years, have been parochi.U and self- 
regarding. " British statesmanship." said the 
intluential writer, whose book has already boon 
cited, in 1910. " has often been right about Europe ; 
. . . but it has ne\er been willinij to hold in its 
hands or to follow for more tlum a brief moment 
the threads of policy which it has taken up or 
lingered. In the European family of nations our 
cluu'acter imd our history have made us amateurs 
and preachei-s." And he heads the chapter which 
contains this ch;u"acterizatioii, so stnmgely 
reminiscent of what we ourselves are fond of saying 
of the United States, with these warning words of 
Mazzini : " // Engliimi posists in ttiiiinhiining this 



THE OUTLOOK 165 

neutral, passive, selfish part, she will have to expiate 
it."' 

It is indeed the passivity of our British selfishness 
whicli renders us so exasperating to Continental 
observers. If we were actively and aggressively 
selfish there would be ground for active complaint ; 
it is our cool way of capitalizing our natural ad- 
vantages of history and situation and of preaching 
a similar businesslike reasonableness to others less 
fortunately ciicumstanced, which brings the word 
hypocrite so readily to Continental lips. What 
other country in the world would have used its 
coal export monopoly to the full, as we did in the 
autumn of 1919, at a time when the price of fuel was 
a matter of life and death to Continental 
manufacturers and workmen, whilst at the same 
time promoting elaborate arrangements of charity 
for the victims of its own policy ? What other 
country could wax so eloquent on the militarism 
of others at a time when the offensive power of its 
own navalism has become one of the main factors 
in European politics ; or could crown a war waged 
on behalf of the sanctity of Treaties with a Treaty 
which itself embodied a violation of international 
right — a Treaty, moreover, which was taken so 
lightly that it was ratified by Parliament almost 
without discussion and is regarded with so little 
sanctity that two out of the three ParUamentary 
parties have declared for its revision regardless of 
the wishes of their co-signatories ? Or again, who 
else but the British would have claimed the idea 
of mandates, of the unselfish trusteeship of weaker 
peoples, as a traditional national principle, at the 

* The Responsibilities of the League, pp. 44 and 29. 



i66 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

very moment when the strict policy of three genera- 
tions, under which we refused to secure special 
advantages for our trade in the dependent Empire, 
has been detinitel}^ broken down ? Or who would 
have granted the Dominions a right to separate 
representatives as independent units in the League 
of Nations concurrently with the inauguration of 
a system of mutual preference, thereby, at least in 
foreign ej^es, turning a unitary Commonwealth into 
the model of a '' selfish economic league " ? Similar 
lapses and inconsistencies could be adduced in our 
commercial legislation, which has wounded ex-ally 
and ex-enemy alike. Sufhce it to say that never has 
our incapacity to see ourselves as others see us been 
so strikingly demonstrated as during the last three 
years. 

What can Britain do to end the Continental 
deadlock ? She can reaHze her own dishonour. 
Few things are more striking, or more painful, at the 
present time for an Englishman than the contrast 
between the indignation or cynicism with which 
his country's policy is regarded in France, in Ger- 
many, and in the new and enlarged states of Central 
Europe for whose problems we have shown so Uttle 
understanding, and the matter of fact way in which 
the same subjects, the same agreed and accepted 
facts, are treated in his own countr3^ One example 
must suffice. The authoritative history of the 
Peace Conference issued by the Institute of Inter- 
national Affairs deals thus with a question which is 
vital to the welfare of some seventy million men, 
women, and children. The Treaty arrangements 
" on reparation and indemnities " it declares* " are 

* Vol. ii., p. 14. 



THE OUTLOOK 167 

the most dubious, but it is of interest to observe that 
the most generally assailed provision in the Treaty, 
that of making Germany responsible for pensions and 
allowances, was proposed " {sup[)orted would be more 
accurate) " by General Smuts, whom no one can 
accuse of vindictiveness towards Germany. While 
there were many who condemned the policy of 
including pensions in reparation, and it is unques- 
tionably the largest financial item in Germany's 
indebtedness, it is also well not to forget that there 
were some high-minded men who supported it." 
The sophistical memorandum by means of which 
General Smuts finally secured President Wilson's 
assent, against the opinion of all his legal advisers, 
to this clause in the draft Treaty will remain a 
permanent slur on his record ' ; it is, however, worth 
citing a German comment, in the popular Reclam 
edition of the Treaty, on this very disingenuous way 
of exploiting a statesman's lapse from rectitude. 
" The injustice of this demand is not only set forth 
by Keynes, but is also revealed by the embarrass- 
ment of other weighty English commentaries."' It 
is exercises in self-deception such as this which 
illustrate the reverse side of our much-vaunted love 
of compromise and our preference, in education, on 
the training of " character " as against " intellect." 
To compromise with Truth on a matter where 
clear thinking is a debt of honour, is a lapse 
of intellectual integrity not far short of the sin 
against the Holy Ghost. 

Let us then set Germany an example in frankly 
facing unpleasant facts and recognize, firstly that the 

* See Appendix V. 

' Reclam's Universal Bibliothek, No. 6206, p. 76. 



i6S KUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

Treaty involves a violation of tlio very principle 
on behalf of which we went to war, and secondly 
that it is we — Biitvvin and the Dominions — 
who are chiefly responsible for these \iolations, 
which were conceived for onr own protit. Once 
this is reali/.ed. as it would be within a few weeks 
had our front bench statesmen on either side the 
moral coinage to expLvin it to the electorate, the 
nation itself would be quick to approve the further 
step. The British Government, acting either alone 
or together with India and the Dominions, should 
formally state that, whilst bound by the clause in 
so far as its co-signatories are coucerned. it has 
altered its opinion as to its moral validity, and that 
it proposes, in consequence, to accept no payments 
due to it on that accoimt. rhe practical elYect of 
such a declaration would be. tirstly. to wipe out 
a considerable proportion of the German liability ; 
secondly, to secure for France and Belgiiun and 
possibly also for Italy the lion's share of the available 
payments. Instead of receiving only sj per cent., 
for instance, as against our jj per cent, of the pav- 
ments due. l-'rance would secure ad\ances for her 
legitimate needs at a considerably higher tigme. 
Thus by publicl\- surrendering a claim to which we 
have no moral justitication. and which lias done 
intlnite harm to our good name, we should do a 
ser\ ice both to France and to Germany and re-equip 
om-selves with authority for our task of mediation 
and appeasement. 

There is another direction which must be briefly 
mentioned here, in which we can make amends for 
onr misdeeds. \\'e ha\e seen that anxiety to secure 
" equ;vlity of trade conditions " accoi"diiig- to Point 3 



TTTE OUTLOOK 169 

of llu! Fourteen Points was a leading consideration 
in the mind of German st.'itesmen in demanding 
the armistice. It is no over-statement to say tiiat 
Point 3 has found no practical embodiment in the 
Treaty at all. " No general conventions weic con- 
cluded on this subject," says the authoritative 
English writer already cited, " because . . . there 
had bc;en no sunicient prior consultation between 
the experts and no mature study of facts and 
projects " — another testimony to the results of the 
vicious procedure of the Conference.* An American 
authority is even more explicit. After explaining 
in some detail what " equality of trade conditions " 
may be h(;ld to mean, tliat it is a declaration against 
discrimination, not against tariffs in general, he 
remarks, " The matter was not thrashed out at 
Paris."* In point of fact the commercial section 
of the Treaty is full of one-sided obligations under- 
taken by Germany to which there correspond no 
guarantees of reciprocal treatment on llic Allied 
side. But these obligations are limited in (Uiralion 
and come to an end, for the most part, in January, 
1925, when, to quote from the Allies' cov(!ring letter 
of June, 1919, " the Alhed and Associated IVjwers 
will be able " (though, be it observed, they do not 
bind themselves) " to co-operate with her ((iermany) 
in arriving at a more permanent arrangement for 
the establishment of an equitable treatment for 
the commerce of all nations." 

There has as yet been no sign that such an arrange- 
ment is in sight, or even contemplated. Recent 
British practice, in fact, has been all in the other 

^Thf Risiionsibililirs of the- I.ca^nr, p. 212. 

r What RialLy Ilajipcnfd at Pans, edited by Colonel House, p. 314. 



170 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

direction. It is not generally known in England, 
though it is more fully realized abroad, to what an 
extent we ha\-e departed since the war from the 
longstanding and pacific tradition of British com- 
mercial policy. " Between i860 and 1919," sa3's a 
recent American official report/ "Great Britain 
maintained the open door in India and in i±ie Crown 
Colonies generally, with either free trade or low 
tariff, for revenue only," the previous system of 
preference having been swept away, after its abuses 
had become manifest, by Gladstone in i860. A 
timid effort to reintroduce it had akead}' been made 
before the war, first in a preferential export duty 
upon tin ore exported from the four ]Malay States, 
which passed unnoticed b}' the British public till 
it was cited as a precedent for further action, and 
then in preferential arrangements between several 
of the \\est Indian Colonies and Canada. During 
the war the breach was widened by the estabhsh- 
ment of a preferential export duty upon palm 
kernels from the West African Colonies, and in 1919 
the system was formally extended to the whole 
non-self go\erning Empire by the granting of 
preferences to all imperial products dutiable under 
the United Kingdom tariff, including of course, 
sugar, cocoa, tea, tobacco, wine and dried fruit. 
At the same time there has been a considerable 
expansion of preferential arrangements in the 
Colonies themselves, initiated, or in the case of 
India, favoured from London. " Complete prefer- 
ential import schedules have been adopted or 
extended," says the report already cited, " by all 

* Introductory Survey of Colonial Tariff Policies, U.S. Tariff Commis- 
sions, Washington, igsi. 



THE OUTLOOK 171 

the tariff divisions of the West Indies except 
Bermuda, and the amount of the preferential has 
been increased ; a complete system of preferences 
has been introduced into Cyprus ; and differential 
export duties have been imposed upon raw hides 
and skins exported from Nigeria, the Gold Coast, 
Sierra Leone, and Gambia," thereby continuing the 
war-time arrangement, " and upon tin ore exported 
from Nigeria. . . . There are thus " (the report 
continues) " in addition to the self-governing 
Dominions and the possessions dependent upon or 
intimately associated with them " (the reference is 
to the mandated territories of the Dominions and to 
areas Hke Basutoland and Bechuanaland) " twenty- 
five tariff jurisdictions among the British Crown 
Colonies, including India, which now have more or 
less extensive differential duties." In addition to 
this we have passed domestic legislation, in par- 
ticular, the Aliens Restriction Act, which discrimi- 
nates against commercial travellers from ex-enemy 
countries, and we have also permitted the Govern- 
ment to become associated with certain private 
enterprises in mandated areas, notably in the 
case of the pre-war private oil concessions in 
Mesopotamia, in a manner which, to say the 
least, gravely strains the meaning of the Open 
Door, 

These are not matters of detail ; they are matters 
of principle, and of vital importance, not only to 
our good name but to our security. The greatest 
external danger which threatens the British Common- 
wealth, the greatest external danger which has 
always threatened it, is a coalition of hostile 
powers. It is due to our fair and generous 



172 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

commercial policy, more than to any other 
single cause, that we were able to maintain 
our naval supremacy, and to extend and develop 
our empire, without exciting undue jealousy and 
active opposition, during the century preceding 
1914. But the world is more crowded and more 
competitive to-day, and we cannot count upon the 
same immunity'. It is courting disaster to recur 
to eighteenth century ideas, to hark back to the old 
plantation theory of empire, at a time when, not 
Germany orly, but a whole array of other states 
have developed their industrial life to a point where 
it is vitally dependent upon raw materials produced 
under the British flag. That flag had long ceased 
to stand for monopoly and has not in the past stood 
for dishonour. It must cease once more to stand 
for either. Once the British public realizes the 
incontestable fact that we pledged ourselves in 
November, 1918, against discriminatory commercial 
policies, and that the policy of preference in the 
not self-governing territories of the Commonwealth 
is a grave departure from the hberal policy which 
is at once the justification and the glory of our 
world-status, it will be ready enough to take the 
practical measures for making the pledges of Novem- 
ber, 191S, and June, 1919, a realit}^ This can best 
be done in an international conference specifically 
summoned to deal with the whole problem of 
commercial policy, a problem which, it cannot be 
emphasized too strongly, contains, more than any 
other, the potentiahties of a new war. Let Britain 
prepare for such a conference by a frank public 
statement of our desire to enter into fair and equit- 
able arrangements, satisfactory to the other 



THE OUTLOOK 173 

industrial states, and in harmony with our 
traditional policy, in regard to this whole group 
of questions, and by working out in detail the 
implications of the " equality of trade conditions " 
accepted by us on November 4, 1918, If her states- 
men do so, and can make the country follow them, 
as they can if they have sufficient faith in their 
cause, they may steer the world back into the calm 
fiscal waters of the cightecn-sixties, when a general 
" most favoured nation treatment " was the order 
of the day, and avert the greatest menace which at 
present threatens our Commonwealth, the danger of 
a coalition of jealous or impoverished trade rivals. 
Moreover, most immediately important of all, by 
paying a debt of honour due both to France and to 
Germany, they will have created the soil and atmos- 
phere in which the tender plant of Anglo-Franco- 
German understanding can at length take root and 
live. And this, as we have already said, is the best 
hope both for the peace of Europe and for the 
League of Nations. 

For with France once more herself and with a 
Germany conscious of her new direction and bring- 
ing her wealth of ancestral endowment into harmony 
with the deeper needs of the modern age, the equi- 
poise of Europe, disturbed for over half a century, 
can once more be restored. Let us not set our 
expectations on the pedestrian level to which men's 
minds have become accustomed since the gieat 
disillusionment of 1919. If the necessary healing can 
be accomplished, a better era may dawn for Europe 
than she has known for seventy years. Restored 
to health and self-confidence, with her long humane 
and heroic tradition enriched and intensified by a 



174 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

great experience, with her rural life eased and 
invigorated by the renewed prosperity of agriculture, 
France will once more be free to radiate the stimulus 
of her ideas and to exercise the harmonizing and 
regulating function which is properly hers in Europe. 
Germany, if, hke the France of 1871, she can win 
her way through to serenity and self-knowledge, 
will yet bless the fate which freed her rich and 
powerful spirit from the compulsion of a mechanical 
tutelage and will feel herself opening out to a new 
enterprise of exploration, in the inner as in the outer 
world, which will at length reveal her true 
spiritual quaUty to mankind. If for France 
the watchword of the moment is simply " Be 
yourself again," the duty laid upon Germany, upon 
individual German men and women, is to look 
inwards and find themselves. 

The main problem of the new European order 
lies, as we have seen, with the three Western powers ; 
but a few words must be said of the other chief 
partners in the Continental scheme. 

The poUtical map of Europe divides itself to-day 
into three sections — the Western, including 
Germany ; the East-Central, including the Suc- 
cession States ; and Russia. The last we may leave 
aside, for it is, for the moment, no longer an integral 
part of Europe. Let us glance for a moment at the 
intermediate region which stretches from Fiume to 
Vilna and from Passau to Athens and Buda- 
Pesth. 

The chief political power in this area, subject 
to the overriding authority of the Supreme Council, 
is exercised by the Little Entente of Czecho- 
slovakia, Jugo-Slavia, and Roumania, and the 



THE OUTLOOK 175 

chief pivot of its politics is Prague. The insight 
and initiative of two great statesmen, of different 
gifts and generations but with the same broad, 
liberal outlook, Masaryk and Benes, have raised 
their young state, at one bound, into a position of 
unusual weight and authority among its compeers. 
The Little Entente constitutes at once an effective 
sanction of the Treaties and a nucleus of crystalliza- 
tion for the activities and the organization dispersed 
or shattered by the break-up of the Habsburg 
monarchy. Those who point the finger of scorn at 
the Danube area as having been " Balkanized " 
can have no first-hand experience of the strength 
of the passions and enthusiasms which swept the 
old order away and set to work to build on its site. 
To reconstitute a Danubian unit because it would 
facilitate trade, or look more tidy on the map, 
is a fantastic policy, though it is often recommended 
by British liberals who would be the first to condemn 
plans of political unification for the congeries of 
nationalities within their own Commonwealth. It 
is through the steady growth of habit, through the 
authority of Time in investing the new frontier with 
a sense of permanence, through peaceful co-operation 
on the firm basis of the accomplished fact, that a 
sense of unity will grow up. Cobdenites would do 
well to remember, what their master, when put 
to the test, himself did not overlook, that Free 
Trade was devised for men and nations, not men 
and nations for Free Trade. When deep seated 
sentiment clashes with commercial convenience, 
sentiment must first be satisfied, but convenience, 
in the long run, finds a way into its own. But such 
adjustments can be hastened rather by sympathetic 



176 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

understanding than by ignorant and instating 
criticism. 

One great Power has been deliberately omitted 
from our survey. Italy belongs half to Western 
and half to East-Central Europe, and has her special 
place, as of right, in both constellations. As Britain 
participates both in the life of Europe and of the 
overseas world, with the detachment, and the duty, 
to act as mediator and interpreter between the two, 
so Italy, perhaps more happily endowed with insight 
and imagination, can do much, as Rome did of old, to 
soften racial asperities and to bring unity and order 
into the hfe of the many peoples whom her influence 
touches. This was the mission foretold for her by 
Mazzini and, though her statesmen of recent years 
have been slow to fulfil it, no one who knows her 
people and their great gifts can doubt her capacity 
to do so. The war has left Italy with many problems, 
but these are mainly of the material order. Despite 
superficial disturbances and embarrassments, she 
has emerged from her first great united effort as a 
kingdom with abounding health and \dtahty. All 
that she needs in order to fill the position that is 
rightly hers is to reahze that she has grown into it. 
When once she is conscious of her strength, she will 
look across the Adriatic with different eyes and 
make harmony and stability, rather than ingenious 
diplomatic combinations, the goal of her policy. 
The Third Rome may yet be the greatest and most 
enduring of the three in binding Slav and Latin 
and Teuton, and even Anglo-Saxon, together in a 
common civilization. If Italy, with her great 
tradition, does not breed good Europeans, where 
else are we to seek them ? 



THE OUTLOOK 177 

CHAPTER II 

THE ECONOMIC OUTLOOK 

The first pre-requisite for an understanding of the 
economic situation in Europe, is to have a clear 
view of its causes. Europe's present difficulties, 
which have become familiar to public opinion both 
in Britain and America owing to the unemployment 
they have caused there, are not due primarily to 
the Treaty of Versailles or to the " Balkanization " 
of East-Central Europe. They are due first and 
chiefly to the character and duration of the war. 
They are the inevitable result of the Siege of Europe. 
They are due, secondly, to the failure of the besiegers 
to take prompt and adequate measures after the 
Armistice to provide the besieged area with the 
means for recuperating its industrial life. And 
only in the third plan and in a minor degree, are 
they due to the Treaties. As regards the Austrian 
and Hungarian Treaties the Habsburg Monarchy 
had fallen to pieces long before they were drafted ; 
they cannot be held responsible for the new frontiers, 
and consequent obstructions to trade, involved in 
its break-up. As regards the Versailles Treaty, 
perhaps the point to which the greatest criticism 
attaches, apart from the inclusion of unwarranted 
items in the German liability, is the delay and the 
consequent unsettlement caused by leaving open 
two vital questions — the fate of Upper Silesia, and 
the amount of the German indemnity. Of these 
the former has now been permanently settled, while 
the latter, fixed conformally with the Treaty in 
May, 1921, only remains unsettled because it is 
Me 



178 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

inseparablj^ bound up with the question of the items 
of the UabiUty. The economic outlook in Europe, 
therefore, involves far wider issues than the " revision 
of the Treaties " with whieh it is often associated. 
No detailed treatment of those issues can be 
attempted here ; all that will be attempted is to 
draw attention to some of the broader facts in the 
situation which the bankers and business men and 
financial and currency experts who have hurried 
to the old Continent's bedside are perhaps in danger 
of overlooking. 

The first point to be noted is that public finance 
is not an infallible index of national prosperity. 
The public finance of the European belligerents in 
the late war. with the exception of Great Britain, 
is in deplorable confusion ; budgets are not 
being balanced and the outlook is obscme and 
dependent on hypothetical hopes and contingencies. 
The N'ictors are looking for reparation and release 
from extra-European debts, the vanquished for 
reduction in their liability. I\Ieanwlule Govern- 
ments are meeting their obligations, not by the 
normal method of taxation, or e\'en by borrowing, 
but by debasing the currency, an expedient rendered 
easier for the modern world tlian for its ancient and 
mediaeval predecessors along this prin\rose path by 
the discovery of the printing jmcss as a device of 
Governmental alchemy. The result is rellected in 
the table of foreign exchanges, the self-registering 
barometer of the public fin;mces of the States of 
the world. 

But public finance and private prosperity are 
two different things, in spite of the close and delicate 
connections between them. The fact that the 



THE OUTLOOK 179 

exchanges with the dollar have fallen in most 
European countries during the last year does not 
necessarily mean that Europe is not recuperating 
in other directions. Public finance is the finance 
of the organization which holds the community 
together, not of the producers of wealth who form 
the active part of the community itself. A state 
cannot collect more in taxes than there is in the 
community to collect ; more indeed than a propor- 
tion of what there is to collect. But it can collect 
a great deal less ; and if, as in many of the states 
of post-war Europe, the tax-collecting equipment 
is weak and ill-orgaui/.ed and state authority itself 
is not fully established in the minds of important 
sections of taxpayers, there is a natural temptation 
to refrain from trjdng to exert it. Or to put it more 
precisely, there is a temptation to exert power 
indirectly, by making the whole community and in 
particular the possessors of fixed money incomes, 
suffer from the results of a debased and fluctuating 
medium of exchange rather than directly, by openly 
laying the tax burden on the shoulders chosen to 
bear it. But it can easily be seen that public 
finance, so conducted, is perfectly compatible with 
a substantial measure of trade and prosperity, and 
this has often been exemplified in the past in South 
America and elsewhere. 

"It is within the experience of the present-day 
banker and exporter," remarks a leading American 
financial authority,' " that business was safely and 
constantly conducted between Colombia and 
Mexico, for instance, on the one hand, and the 

1 Mr. Alvin W. Krcch. President of the Equitable Trust Company 
of New Y. rk, in a fon word lo a iianiplilct by Professor Seligman on 
Currency, Inflation and Public Debts. 



l8o EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

United States on the other, in spite of the fact that 
in the case of Colombia tlie value of its paper 
currency had fallen progTcssively to the extent of 
99 per cent, of its gold standaid, and in the case of 
^lexico the paper cnrrency had been entirely 
extingiiisliod. The fact is that a country which 
has no currency \vhate\'er, or the currency of which 
is totally valueless, can nevertheless conduct and 
engage in foreign trade just so long as it has some- 
thing to export. Under such circumstances the 
currency used must of necessity be foreign currency. 
. . . This is precisely the method now pui-sued by 
the Austrian, Germim. or Polish manufacturer who 
is dependent upon the importation of foreign raw 
materials for the conduct of his business." 

In spite of the hindrances thus invoh'od by 
Governmental action, there lias been, in fact, during 
tlie last year, a perceptible impro^•ement in the 
economic situation throughout the continent. It 
is due to numerous causes both psychological and 
material. The war is receding daily further into 
the past. Men are recoNcring from the physical 
and nervous exhaustion of the struggle. Boj's 
who were too yoiuig to fight are stepping into the 
ranks of the producers. Life is resuming its routine ; 
the new governments and frontiei^s, the new laws 
and trade routes, are becoming iirmly established. 
The machinery' of production is being steadily 
repaired ; roads and railways are being made more 
available for traffic ; ser\ices are being resumed 
and factories restored to pre-war uses. Arrange- 
ments are being increasingly made to overcome 
the difficulty of securing oversea raw material 
through tliis or that agency of linaiicing. \Miile 



THE OUTLOOK i8i 

the " tired waves " of international and govern- 
mental action have seemed " no painful inch to 
gain," private enterprise, working imperceptibly 
through a thousand creeks and inlets, lias come 
flooding in. The work of the Genoa Conference 
will be to promote the governmental policies and 
to strengthen the necessary basis of public conhdence 
which will facilitate these private agencies. 

Recuperation through private enterprise is a 
strange and unexpected result after the hopes of 
co-operative governmental action held out by the 
project of a League of Nations, and after three 
generations of propaganda for reform through 
sociahsm or state action, iiut the fact must be 
faced that, as the European situation has been 
allowed to develop since the armistice, the capitalist 
entrepreneur is more needed, is worth more to 
European society, than at any time since Europe 
was first opened up to modern industrialism in the 
first half of the last century. Men hke Stinnes and 
Loucheur, Kathenau and Krassin, In vei forth and 
Leverhulme, little as we may sometimes like them, 
much as some of us might prefer the rule of a Robert 
Cecil or a Lansbury, do in fact, in virtue of certain 
gifts of mind and character, gilts that have in pre- 
war Europe as in present-day America been greatly 
overvalued and overpaid, hold the master-key to 
the revival of prosperity for tiie populations whom 
the war has plunged into destitution. It does not 
need a prophet's vision to descry that we are enter- 
ing upon a period of capitalist revival when the big 
strategic outlook which distinguishes the " captain 
of industry " in Europe and America will be more 
than ever in evidence. Our difficulty in the coming 



iS2 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

years will not bo to save Europe from bankruptcy 
but to save her soul from her Svivioui-s. 

Meanwhile there is a piuwllol process of develop- 
ment going on in another region of production. The 
p)easant has come into his own. \\"e ha\e seen that 
the war involved the t em ponvry de-industrialization 
of the blockaded area. A corollary to this was the 
alteration of the balance of economic power between 
town and country. If there were, to quote Mr. 
Hoover's tigure, a hundred million more people in 
Europe than could be fed from the continent's own 
supplies, how fortunate was the position of their 
producei's during the period when oversea supplies 
were cut olf. tii-st by allied sea power and then by 
the fall of the exdumges ! F;uinei"s ha\e in fact 
everywhere in Europe, both in the blockaded area 
and in the allied iviid neutral countries affected by 
the submaiine camp^iign, in spite of the shortage 
of fertilizers luid other inconveniences, greatly 
improved their economic position. The writer 
was present not long ago at a political meeting in 
a rural district in Great Britain, wlien a front bench 
politician advocated a capital levy on " war-made 
wealth " ; the silence in which the suggestion was 
received was eloquent of the feelings and the bank 
balances of an audience consisting predominantly 
of farmers. An interesting study could be made of 
the growth of investment among the farming class 
in Britain and other countries. E\ery where in 
Emope, from Irekuid and Wales to Friuice and 
Bavaiia imd Austria and Italy and Bulgtiria, even 
to war-scarred Poland and Serbia and tlie Baltic 
Republics, the peasimts liave impro\ed their posi- 
tion, both against the town banker, to whom thej' 



THE OUTLOOK 183 

were often in bondage, and against the landlord. 
In Great liritain tlio result has been manifested in 
the widespread break-up by sale of large landed 
estates and their acquirement by working farmers ; 
the same process has been in operation in France, 
already predominantly a land of small working 
landed proprietors ; a recent authority states that 
a million new proprietors have come into existence 
since tlie war. In Italy and in liastern Europe 
generally the process has been more summary. 
Many of the Latifundia, the large landed pro- 
perties in South Italy and Sicily, often in the 
hands of absentee proprietors acting through local 
baihffs, have simply been annexed by working 
peasants, and tlie (K^vernment, which can reckon 
on bringing the town workman to heel through the 
law of supply and demand, has been unable to 
interfere. In Czecho-Slovakia there has been drastic 
legislation against large estates ; in Koumania 
similar action has been foreshadowed ; in Croatia 
the charige of government has in many cases led 
automatically to the same result ; whilst in Poland 
a like process cannot long be delayed. The immediate 
result of this may in some cases be to diminish 
production by removing the skilled supervision 
which the existence of large landed units sometimes 
though not always implied, but its permanent result 
throughout Europe, as in Ireland, cannot be other- 
wise than healthy and stabilizing, and new and 
more democratic methods of elliciency will emerge 
in due course. 

There has also been a steady movement of 
convalescence in the commercial pohcy of the 
European states, particularly of the new states 



i84 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

In 1918, as we have seen, new administrations were 
formed all over Central and Eastern Europe to deal 
with a disintegrating continent, and their first 
effort everywhere, as was inevitable, was to affirm 
their own existence. New frontiers had first to 
be physically created, and next to be emphasized 
by government action. New channels had to be 
dug for commerce and intercourse, and travellers 
and traders and bankers had to be persuaded to 
use them. Nations Uke Poland and Czecho- 
slovakia, which had previously only had a com- 
mercial policy in imagination, or in the voluntary 
action, b}^ boycott or preferential treatment, of 
their devoted partisans, were now able to make 
their will effective and to translate nationalist 
theory into fact. Economic nationalism, whether 
right or wrong, wise or unwise, is almost invariably 
associated in the modern world with the movement 
for political independence ; and no one acquainted 
with the incredible lengths to which nationalist 
feehng had been carried, in the economic field, 
in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and in Prussian 
Poland, could doubt that the immediate effect of 
political freedom would be the inauguration of 
strongly self-regarding and nationaUst poHcies in 
the sphere of trade and industry. 

It is the ignoring of this vital factor of sentiment 
and tradition which initiates much of the recent 
writing in Britain and America about the East 
European situation. Mr. Ke^Ties, for instance, 
included in his list of proposed remedies for " the 
economic consequences of the peace " a Free 
Trade Union, composed of " Germany, Poland, and 
the new states which formerly composed the Austro- 



THE OUTLOOK 185 

Hungarian and Turkish Empires," with the presum- 
able addition of intermediate states such as Bulgaria 
or Greece. What is this but a revival, in an ex- 
tended and more difficult form, and under infinitely 
more difficult circumstances, of the Mitteleuropa 
project which Friedrich Naumann launched in 1915, 
when the German military machine was more and 
more assuming the role of an economic administra- 
tion for the whole blockaded area ? Naumann 
indeed went further than Keynes in definite schemes 
of centralized economic control ; he proposed the 
setting up of a number of commissions at Prague, 
acting in indefinite collaboration with the so-called 
surviving sovereign governments. But both his 
scheme and Keynes' foundered on the same rock. 
They ignored the fact that political independence 
carries with it, inevitably and necessarily, control 
of commercial poUcy ; for a state which cannot 
tax itself as it desires has been deprived of the most 
indispensable instrument of social, that is of 
indisputably domestic policy. 

Perhaps British readers will best appreciate this 
point when it is illustrated for them in their own 
history. In 1859, when Free Trade was at the 
zenith of its popularity, when the idea, not of a 
Free Trade Union for Europe or for the British 
Europe but for the world, was seriously entertained 
by large sections of opinion, the Government of 
Canada for the first time levied a duty on British 
imports. The Colonial Office protested in the name 
of Free Trade and imperial unity. The Canadian 
reply is worth placing on record, for it expresses what 
is being thought in Prague and Warsaw, in Belgrade 
and in Bucharest, and in Dublin also, to-day : 



i86 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

" The Government of Canada, acting for its 
legislature and people, cannot, through those feelings 
of deference which they owe to the Imperial 
authorities, in any way waive or diminish the right 
of the people of Canada to decide for themselves 
both as to the mode and extent to which taxation 
shall be imposed. . . . Self-Government would be 
utterly annihilated if the views of the Imperial 
Government were to be preferred to those of the 
people of Canada. It is therefore the duty of the 
Canadian legislature to adjust the taxation of the 
people in the way they deem best, even if it should 
unfortunately happen :o meet the disapproval of 
the Imperial Ministry. Her Majesty cannot be 
advised to disallow such Acts unless her advisers 
axe prepared to assume the administration of the 
affairs of the Colony irrespective of the views of 
its inhabitants." 

Here is the issue of economic independence put 
in its plainest form. It is tlie creed which has rent 
the Austro-Hungarian ^Monarchy, as it has still 
more recently rent the United Kingdom of Great 
Britain and Ireland. It has raised a wall between 
Vienna and Prague, as between Belfast and Dubhn, 
and it will subsist as long as the sentiments of 
political attachment by which it is nourished 
maintain their hold, on men's minds. You cannot, 
as English liberals often fondly imagine, have 
political nationalism without custom-houses. The 
one may be admirable and the other odious, but 
they are part of the same scheme. If Switzerland, 
in spite of her weakness and her distance from the 
sea, has succeeded in preserving her economic 
independence and even in fighting tariff wars with 



THE OUTLOOK 187 

her neighbours, right through the period of Free 
Trade predominance, resisting every temptation 
held out to her to enter into larger combinations, 
what likelihood is there that the younger republics, 
formed in the heyday of nationalist feeling, will 
consent to abrogate their sovereign rights ? * 

What then is the line of advance ? It is that 
which British hberals are so fond of advocating for 
the British Commonwealth itself — co-operation 
between independent governments. NationaUst 
sentiment demands in Canada and Ireland, as in 
Poland and Czecho-Slovakia, that independence, 
fully secured and guaranteed, shall precede co-opera- 
tion ; but, its main object achieved, it will not 
be blind to arguments of economic convenience. 
And it is in this spirit that the wiser heads among 
the new nations are steadily working ; Czecho- 
slovakia in particular, has been entering into a 
whole network of co-operative arrangements with 
her many neighbours, whilst the recent Conference 
of Porto Rosa has carried the same principle into 
practical effect in numerous important directions 
for all the Succession States of the Austro-Hungarian 
Monarchy including Italy. Here rather than in 
wholesale schemes for tearing up the Treaties and 
tidying up the map of Europe, lies the direction in 
which good Europeans and prudent economic 
thinkers alike should look for the recuperation of 
the long-suffering continent. 

There are signs that this is at last being realized ; 
that the idealistic advocates of the revision of the 
territorial clauses of the Treaties are realizing the 

1 On the very instructive history if Swiss Commercial Policy see 
Die Schweiz unci die Euroydische Handelspolittk, von Dr. Peter Heinrich 
Schmidt (Zurich, 1914). 



iSS EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

practical value of the remedial agencies ready to 
their hand in the minority rights clauses of the 
Treaties and in the growing autliority of the League 
of Nations, while the economists who. three years 
ago, not unnaturally for them, could descry nothing 
but the immediate disintegrating effects of the 
redrawing of the map of Europe, are realizing the 
essential stabihty of a struct me based, broadly 
speaking and with undeniable exceptions, upon 
popular consent, and are ready to help the new 
go^•e^lments to achie%e progress upon their own 
hnes. 

The financial and commercial difficulties of the 
continent, and their reaction upon the commexce 
of the whole world, aie now evident to all. They 
have formed the subject of hmumerable books and 
pamphlets, the schemes and conferences, and the 
ad\ice which was spmned by the statesmen in 1919 
is being eagerly sought in iqjj. It is not the purpose 
of these pages to add anything to the technical side 
of these discussions. But it may be well to conclude 
this chapter by drawuig attention lirst to the spirit 
in which all such remedial measures should be put 
forward, and then to the reaction upon opinion, 
more particularly progressive opinion, of the 
situation idready outlined. 

The central difficulty of the economic situation is 
the problem of reparation. That problena is, at 
bottom, not an economic problem ; it is not even a 
political problem ; it is a moral problean. Germany 
has done France and Belgium grievous wrong by 
waging the war on their territory, and Britain has 
done France grievous wrong, both materially and 
mor^dly, by taking the lead in well-nigh trebling 



THE OUTLOOK 189 

the Germany indemnity, and by insisting on her 
own unjust claims at the expense of the just claims 
of her former Ally. This situation cannot be repaired 
by a merely commercial arrangement. All three 
parties must return to the ground of justice and 
mutual confidence which is the only basis of an 
enduring understanding. It will be a long time 
before France can feel that she has once more a 
thorough renewal of confidence in Germany, shat- 
tered as this was so rudely in 1914. But she will be 
ready to feel confidence once more in Britain and in 
the honourable traditions of British statesmanship, 
when a Britisli Premier has once and for all made 
it clear to his own countrymen and to the world 
that Britain took the lead in playing a dishonourable 
part in 1919, and that she waives her claims to the 
benefits accruing to her from that pohcy, not as an 
act of generosity, a pretended beau gcsle, or as one 
item in an elaborate bargain, but as an act of justice. 
It is not easy for public men to admit that they 
or their predecessors have been in the wrong. 
But, as France manifested to the world in the 
Dreyfus case, there is great healing value in a frank 
peccavi. 

What of progressive opinion in the post-war 
situation ? Its main task is to adjust itself to a 
wholly new state of affairs, for which nineteenth 
century schemes and ideologies have ill prepared 
it. It must accept — how can it help accepting ? — 
the present capitalist revival as inevitable. Where 
Lenin has bowed to inexorable fact how can more 
moderate reformers continue to nurse illusions ? 
Socialism and the tradition of revolution and of 
Messianic expectation, which it carried with it, are 



igo EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

dead past recall ; and it will not take many years 
before its organizations have either disintegrated 
into impossibilist sects or broken their connections 
with their parent doctrine. Europe, the Disunited 
States of Europe, is entering upon a stage of her 
economic life not unlike that upon which the United 
States of America entered after their own Civil War ; 
and in this period of reconstruction, of large conces- 
sions to capitalist enterprise, of grandiose schemes 
of development, lie all the dangers which, to three 
generations of Americans, have been summed up 
in the words " Wall Street." Europe needs her 
Wall Street financiers, but she needs also, as 
Americans can tell her, to learn how to control 
them. If they are the guardians of prosperity, who 
shall protect her from their ambitions ? Quis 
custodiet ipsos custodes ? 

The chief negative truth, the chief task in the 
famihar region of protest and " muck-raking " 
for post-war progressivism in Europe, will be to 
preserve political democracy from domination by 
capitalist influence, whether native or foreign. It 
will be to maintain hberty unimpaired, and to 
extend it and at the same time to make due use of 
the agencies indispensable to the restoration of 
European life. It will not be easy, and the smaller 
the political unit the weaker and more inexperienced 
its Government, the harder it will be. These great 
corporations so perfectly manned with the great 
salaries at their command, with constitutions so 
skilfully adopted, like the machinery in their mills, 
to the work they are called upon to do, exercise a 
power in the modern world which the old-fashioned 
and cumbersome systems of democracy, of control 



THE OUTLOOK 191 

by the plain man, find it hard to meet on equal 
terms. In the course of the last few generations 
private power has steadily improved its technique, 
whilst the organization of public power, if it has not 
stood still, has too often been developed by 
demagogues and caucus politicians for other than 
public purposes. Even in great political com- 
munities Uke Great Britain and France, where there 
is a long tradition of political experience and 
responsible public opinion, public power has a hard 
battle to fight, as all who have peeped behind the 
scenes know well, against private power. How 
much more difiicult is the struggle Ukely to be in 
small scale communities like the new repubhcs, 
dependent, as they must be, in many respects upon 
outside financial aid, and even in large scale com- 
munities like Germany, where the mass of people 
has still to learn the practice of political democracy. 
Representative Democracy, no longer threatened 
from without, as in the generation preceding 1918, 
has a stern struggle to wage in the coming genera- 
tion against the self-regarding forces within each 
community which, as Naumann proposed for 
Germany's allies in 1915, would preserve its forms 
and leave its substance at the mercy of the capitalist 
saviours of society. 

In this battle for democracy progressives will find a 
new meeting ground and new watchwords. Old style 
socialists and old style liberals, discarding their re- 
spective shibboleths from the eighteen-forties, will 
join forces in a new movement which, going back 
behind Marx and Cobden to the broader and more 
truly prophetic gospel of Mazzini, will unite the 
social and national streams that for the last two 



192 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

generations have flowed in separate channels. They 
will seek in the field of politics to maintain the 
tradition of responsible self-government, of the 
personal duty of active citizenship for modern men 
and women and to cleanse its institutions from the 
debasing influences which have led men to seek for 
remedies in old and new systems of minority rule ; 
or, to put the problem in the concrete, they will have 
to discover means by which the mass of plain men 
and women can be induced to free themselves from 
boss or sectional domination by pacing for their 
politics themselves ; for party finance is really the 
key to the rehabilitation of democracy. And they 
will seek, in the economic sphere, by sustained 
dispassionate, realistic experiment in every field 
of labour, to find means for solving the industrial 
dilemma of the modem world — how to maintain 
a good life for the producer as well as a good life 
for the consumer, how to render the vast apparatus 
of modern industriahsm, and the comforts and 
conveniences and, as we think, necessaries which 
it involves for our lives compatible with a life of 
dignity and self-respect, of inner freedom and true 
happiness, for those who, whether by hand or 
brain, earn their livehhood in its manifold produc- 
tivities. 

These are the poHtical tasks for forward looking 
men in the new Europe. But greater tasks remain. 
Civilization itself remains to be rescued from the 
slough of materialism and wealth seeking and set 
upon a spiritual basis. We need a new sense of 
unity such as the universities and churches have 
failed to give us, both in our minds and in that 
deeper region of which the language of reason is 



THE OUTLOOK 193 

but the over-simplified and often too jejune expres- 
sion. We need a revaluation of our western values 
and a new sense of kinship with those sections of 
the human family who have refused to bow the 
knee in the temple of material progress. We need, 
if not a new religion — the phrase is unduly institu- 
tional — a new impetus towards the unseen, towards 
the realm where moth and dust do not corrupt and 
where are garnered the riches which no grasping 
governments can tax and no fluctuations of exchange 
can diminish. 

Who shall guide us into that country ? Those 
who have already looked across the river at its 
shining distances. There are in the Europe of 
to-day thousands and tens of thousands of men who 
have lived for years in the presence of Death and 
who, with the angel ever at their side, with friend 
after friend being rapt away, with their own life's 
account neatly totalled and ready to present to 
the Judge, have weighed this world's values in the 
balances and discovered their true measure. These 
men hold the destiny of Europe in their hands, 
for they are strong enough to bear it. It is they, 
not the capitalists, mere possessors of dust and 
dross, who can save Europe if they will. Yet a few 
years and the generation which still sits enthroned 
in the seats of power, a generation too old or too 
cynical, too clever or too callous, to have been 
touched by the living fire of the war years, or of 
their heroes, will have passed from the scene. Those 
who follow them, whether in Britain or in France, 
in Germany or in Italy, or in the Slav or other 
lands beyond, will have a double gift of power and 
knowledge — the power that comes from the energy 

Ne 



194 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

and determination of youth, together with such 
knowledge of human life and character and destiny 
as is vouchsafed to most only at life's close, too 
late to reaUze it in action and in purpose. This 
generation of young Europeans knows ; and know- 
ing, it is still young enough to act. Death, which 
has decimated its ranks, has left the survivors 
stronger than before. In their strength and in 
their loneliness, and in their memory of sacred 
hours and friendships, they will use the lives that 
have been given back to them to restore life — true 
life — to a world so sadly in need of it. Europe, 
the mother continent, has not yet run her race or 
finished her achievement. Scarred and suffering, 
destitute, pauperized, and humiliated, she keeps 
both her pride and her ideals, and deep in her heart, 
too deep as yet for utterance in a language that 
others can understand, she bears the promise of a 
future which will cause men to reverence her, even 
in her adversity, not merely as the source and 
origin of civilization, but as its pioneer. 



APPENDICES 

/. — Allied Note to President Wilson, November 4, 
1918. 

" The Allied Governments have given careful 
consideration to the correspondence which has 
passed between the President of the United States 
and the German Government. 

" Subject to the qualifications which follow, they 
declare their willingness to make peace with the 
Government of Germany on the terms of peace 
laid down in the President's address to Congress of 
January 8, 1918, and the principles of settlement 
enunciated in his subsequent addresses. They 
must point out, however, that Clause 2, relating 
to what is usually described as the freedom of the 
seas, is open to various interpretations, some of 
which they could not accept. They must, there- 
fore, reserve to themselves complete freedom on 
this subject when they enter the Peace Conference. 

" Further, in the conditions of peace laid down 
in his address to Congress of January 8, 1918, the 
President declared that the invaded territories 
must be restored as well as evacuated and freed, 
and the Allied Governments feel that no doubt 
ought to be allowed to exist as to what this pro- 
vision implies. By it they understand that com- 
pensation will be made by Germany for all damage 
done to the civilian population of the Alhes, and 
their property by the aggression of Germany by 
land, by sea, and from the air." 

195 



196 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

II. — Opening paragraph of the reply oj the Allied 
and Associated Powers to the observations of the 
German Delegation on the Conditions of Peace, 
June, 1919. 

" The Allied and Associated Powers are in com- 
plete accord with the German Delegation in their 
insistence that the basis for the negotiation of the 
treaty of peace is to be found in the correspondence 
which immediately preceded the signing of the 
armistice on November 11, 1918. It was there 
agreed that the treaty of peace should be based 
upon the Fourteen Points of President Wilson's 
address of January 8, 191 8, as they were modified 
by the Allies' memorandum included in the 
President's note of November 5, 1918, and upon 
the principles of settlement enunciated by President 
Wilson in his later addresses, and particularly in 
his address of September 27, 1918. These are the 
principles upon which hostihties were abandoned 
in November, 1918 ; these are the principles upon 
which the Allied and Associated Powers agreed that 
peace might be based ; these are the principles 
which have guided them in the deliberations which 
have led to the formulation of the conditions of 
peace." 

III. — Extract from a speech delivered by Mr. J. M. 
Keynes on October i"^, 1921, at the International 
Conference on Economic Recovery and World 
Peace, held at the Caxton Hall, Westminster. 

" We must by no means forget that the bill for 
devastation only comprehends about one-third of 
the whole. Nearly two-thirds of our demand is 
for pensions and allowances. The inclusion of 



APPENDICES 197 

pensions and allowances in our claim has very 
nearly trebled the demands which we are making 
upon Germany. I have given reasons in the past 
for thinking that the inclusion of these claims 
was contrary to our engagements, and I do not 
admit that I have been refuted. I still think that 
the inclusion of those claims was contrary to our 
engagements, and that, even late in the day, it is 
our duty to abandon them. 

"Apart from questions of international right, the 
addition of pensions (according to the views of those 
Americans who took part at Paris) was largely at 
the instigation of this country, in order to inflate 
the proportion of the claims due to us. If we 
limited ourselves to devastation, it was understood 
that the share of the British Empire would be 
comparatively small compared with the share of 
France. The object of including pensions was to 
raise the proportion which we could claim, and so 
aid the justification of election promises. American 
commentators upon this, who were delegates at 
the Peace Conference, were greatly surprised at 
the French ever agreeing to it. I lay emphasis 
on this because, as it was chiefly in the interests of 
Great Britain that these claims are there, it is a 
matter about which we ourselves can properly 
initiate amendments. If the claim for pensions 
and allowances were to be abohshed, that must 
necessarily increase greatly the proportion accruing 
to France, which, in my opinion, is a thing right and 
proper, and one which we can justly propose. I 
repeat, therefore, that the claim for pensions and 
allowances ought to be dropped, for reasons of 
legality, for reasons of good sense having regard to 



igS EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

the total magnitude of the demands, and also in 
view of the relative claims of France and ourselves 
on the available funds. I urge this on your atten- 
tion. If we drop the claims for pensions and 
allowances, and if we consider coolly what the 
devastated area will really cost to make good, 
Germany can pay it." 

IV. — Extract from article by Mr. T. W. Lamont, 
Economic Adviser to the American Peace Com- 
mission, printed in " What Really Happened at 
Paris," London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1921. 

The Inclusion of Pensions. 

" The American delegation as a whole, while deeply 
sympathetic sentimentally with the idea that 
pensions should be included as damage to the 
civilian population, found it dithcult to reconcile 
this contention with actual principle, feeling that 
pensions fell more properly into the category of 
military costs of war. Mr. Lloyd George, however, 
advocated with great vigour and ingenuity the 
inclusion of pensions under the head of damage to 
the civilian population. Said he : ' You mean to 
say that France is to be compensated for the loss 
of a chimney pot in the devastated district, but not 
for the loss of a life ? Do you set more value upon 
a chimney than you do upon a soldier's hfe ? ' 
This argument was appeahng, but not necessarily 
sound, 

" However, it was General Jan Smuts who finally 
prepared the argument which convinced President 
Wilson that pensions and separation allowances 
should be included in the reparation bill, . . I 



APPENDICES 199 

well remember the day upon which President Wilson 
determined to support the inclusion of pensions 
in the reparation bill. Some of us were gathered 
in his library in the Place des Iitats-Unis, having 
been summoned by him to discuss this particular 
question of pensions. We explained to him that 
we could not find a single lawyer in the American 
delegation that would give an opinion in favour of 
including pensions. All the logic was against it. 
' Logic ! Logic ! ' exclaimed the President, ' I 
don't give a damn for logic. I am going to include 
pensions ! ' " 

V. — Memorandum by General Smuts which won over 
President Wilson's assent to the Pensions and 
Separations Allowances Clauses of the Treaty 
of Versailles {Article 244, Annex i, Clauses 5 
and 7), published in " The Making of the 
Reparation and Economic Sections of the 
Treaty," by Bernard M. Baruch ; Harper s, 
New York, 1920, p. 29. 

Note on Reparation. 
" The extent to which reparation can be claimed 
from Germany depends in the main on the meaning 
of the last reservation made by the Allies in their 
note to President Wilson, November, 1918. That 
reservation was agreed to by President Wilson and 
accepted by the German Government in the armis- 
tice negotiations and was in the following terms : 

' Further, in the conditions of peace laid down 
in his address to Congress on January 8, 1918, 
the President declared that invaded territories 



200 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

must be restored as well as evacuated and made 
free. The Allied Governments feel that no doubt 
ought to be allowed to exist as to what this 
provision implies. By it they understand that 
compensation will be made by Germany for all 
damage done to the civilian population of the 
AlHes and to their property by the aggression of 
Germany by land, by sea, and from the air.' 

" In this reservation a careful distinction must 
be made between the quotation from the President, 
which refers to the e\'acuation and restoration of 
the invaded territories, and the imphcation which 
the AUies find in that quotation and which they 
proceed to enunciate as a principle of general 
applicability. The Allies found in the President's 
provision for restoration of the invaded territories 
a general principle implied of far-reaching scope. 
This principle is that of compensation for all damage 
to the civilian population of the Allies in their 
persons or property, which resulted from the German 
aggression, and whether done on land or sea or from 
the air. By accepting this comprehensive principle 
(as the German Government did) they acknowledged 
their liability to compensation for all damage to 
the civihan population or their property wherever 
and however arising, so long as it was the result of 
German aggression. The President's limitation to 
restoration of the inv^aded territories only of some 
of the Allies was clearly abandoned. 

"The next question is how to understand the 
phrase ' civilian population ' in the above reserva- 
tion, and it can be most conveniently answered by 
an illustration. A shopkeeper in a village in 



APPENDICES 201 

northern France lost his shop through enemy 
bombardment and was himself badly wounded. 
He would be entitled as one of the civilian popula- 
tion to compensation for the loss of his property 
and for his personal disablement. He subsequently 
recovered completely, was called up for military 
service, and after being badly wounded and spend- 
ing some time in the hospitals, was discharged as 
permanently unfit. The expense he was to the 
French Government during this period as a soldier 
(his pay and maintenance, his uniform, rifle, ammuni- 
tion, his keep in the hospital, etc.) was not damage 
to a civilian, but mihtary loss to his Government, 
and it is therefore arguable that the French Govern- 
ment cannot recover compensation for such expense 
under the above reservation. His wife, however, 
was during this period deprived of her bread winner, 
and she therefore suffered damage as a member of 
the civilian population, for which she would be 
entitled to compensation. In other words, the 
separation allowances paid to her and her children 
during this period by the French Government 
would have to be made good by the German Govern- 
ment, as the compensation which the allowances 
represent was their hability. After the soldier's 
discharge as unfit, he rejoins the civilian population, 
and as for the future he cannot (in whole or in part) 
earn his own livelihood, he is suffering damage as 
a member of the civilian population, for which the 
German Government are again liable to make 
compensation. In other words the pension for 
disablement which he draws from the French 
Government is really a liability of the German 
Government which they must under the above 



202 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

reservation make good to the French Government. 
It could not be argued that as he was disabled 
while a soldier he does not suffer damage as a 
civilian after his discharge if he is unfit to do his 
ordinary work. He does literally suffer as a civilian 
after his discharge, and his pension is intended to 
make good the damage, and is therefore a liability 
of the German Government. If he had been killed 
in active service, his wife as a civilian would have 
been totally deprived of her bread-winner and 
would be entitled to compensation. In other 
words, the pension she would draw from the French 
Government would really be a habihty of the 
German Government under the above reservation, 
and would have to be made good by them to the 
French Government. 

" The plain, common sense construction of the 
reservation therefore leads to the conclusion that, 
while direct war expenditure (such as the pay and 
equipment of soldiers, the cost of rifles, guns, and 
ordnance and all similar expenditures) could 
perhaps not be recovered from the Germans, yet 
disablement pensions to discharged soldiers, or 
pensions to widows and orphans, or separation 
allowances paid to their wives and children during 
the period of their mihtary service are all items 
representing compensation to members of the 
civilian population for damage sustained by them 
for which the German Government are liable. What 
was spent by the Alhed Governments on the soldier 
himself, or on the mechanical appliances of war, 
might perhaps not be recoverable from the German 
Government under the reservation, as not being 
in any plain and direct sense damage to the civilian 



APPENDICES 203 

population. But what was, or is, spent on the 
citizen before he became a soldier or after he has 
ceased to be a soldier, or at any time on his family, 
represents compensation for damage done to 
civilians and must be made good by the German 
Government under any fair interpretation of the 
above reservation. This includes all war pensions 
and separation allowances, which the German 
Government are liable to make good, in addition 
to reparation or compensation for all damage done 
to property of the Allied peoples. 

(Signed) J. C. Smuts." 
Paris, March 31, 1919. 

VI. — Extract from Statement and Analysis by Mr. 
Herbert Hoover on " The Economic Situation in 
Europe," dated July 3, 1919, published in the 
National Food Journal, issued by the British 
Ministry of Food, on August 13, 1919. 

" The economic dilhculties of Europe as a whole 
at the signature of peace may be almost summarized 
in the phrase ' demoralized productivity.' The 
production of necessaries for this 450,000,000 
population (including Russia) has never been at 
so low an ebb as at this day. 

" A summary of the unemployment bureaux in 
Europe will show that 15,000,000 families are 
receiving unemployment allowances in one form 
or another, and are, in the main, being paid by 
constant inflation of currency. A rough estimate 
would indicate that the population of Europe is 
at least 100,000,000 greater than can be supported 
without imports, and must live by the production 



204 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

and distribution of exports. . . . From all causes, 
accumulated to different intensity in different 
localities, there is the essential fact that, unless 
productivity can he rapidly increased, there can he 
nothing hut political, moral, and economic chaos, 
finally interpreting itself in loss of life on a scale 
hitherto undreamed of." 

VII. — Extract from Paper read hy Mr. A. E. 
Zimmern to a National Conference of British 
Working-class Associations at Birmingham on 
September 22, 1917. 

" But the most urgent economic task which the 
settlement will impose will not be domestic, but 
international ; it will be concerned, as we have 
already suggested, with the securing of supplies 
upon which the recuperation of the peoples, and, 
more especially, of the industrial peoples, depends. 
How can this problem best be dealt with ? It is 
worth while trying to answer this question, for upon 
its successful solution in the months following the 
signing of peace the international ' atmosphere ' 
of the post-war period will very largely depend. 

" Private capitalism, as we have seen, must prove 
unequal to the task. Nor will ' industrial self- 
government ' help us, for we are dealing with what 
is essentially a problem of foreign trade and foreign 
policy. The responsibility for supplying the needs 
of their exhausted populations must, in one form 
or another, be borne by the various governments, 

" What form should this action take ? The 
natural course might seem to be for the various 
governments concerned to deal with the matter 



APPENDICES 205 

themselves ; and in point of fact, enough is known 
for the conjecture to be hazarded that every Govern- 
ment in Europe, belHgerents and neutrals alike, 
is already setting on foot an official organization to 
deal with the problem of post-war supplies. Self- 
preservation alone demands it. No belligerent 
Government dare demobilize its armies till it can 
provide employment for its workers, and employ- 
ment depends in its turn upon industrial raw 
material, and raw material upon shipping. There 
is therefore urgent need for all the Governments 
to organize what resources they can lay their hands 
on with at least the same thoroughness as they 
have devoted to the business of mobilization or 
making war. In spite of the perilous uncertainty 
of many of the factors involved, dependent as they 
are on the terms of peace, Government ' Reconstruc- 
tion Departments ' are probably everywhere at 
work on the twin problems of demobilization and 
suppUes. . . . 

" The war will have been fought in vain if it 
finds the various Governments in their mutual 
business relations, actuated by the same grasping 
and anti-social spirit as too often characterized 
their pre-war commercial activities. If the problem 
is left to be solved on competitive lines, with the 
Governments outbidding one another, there will be 
a scrambling and pushing, and threatening and 
bullying such as the world has never seen before, 
and the League of Nations will perish in its cradle 
amid the wrangles of the rival disputants. The 
problem is one that can only be handled success- 
fully on co-operative lines, both in the interests of 
the world as a whole and of the populations 



2o6 EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE 

concerned. And once it is realized that co-operation 
between the various governments is the only policy 
compatible with a tolerable state of international 
relations after the war, it will not take long to draw 
the further conclusion that the wisest course would 
be to set the whole matter on an international 
basis ; in other words, for the various Governments 
to delegate powers to purchase, allocate, and convey 
suppHes on their behalf to an international com- 
mission. Such a commission would then, in effect, 
become a ReUef Commission for the world as a 
whole, similar to the Commission which looked 
after the needs of Belgium under American guidance 
during the earlier period of the war. 

" If the machinery had to be created de novo 
within a few weeks or months, its world-wide scope 
might well prove beyond the powers of human 
organization. But in fact the machinery is already 
there ready to hand ; it exists in the shape of the 
blockade, and the Inter-Ally economic control 
which has been estabhshed in connection with it. 
The blockade, which was first established to keep 
goods out of Central Europe, slowly developed 
through the pressure of events into an organization 
for allocating shipping and supplies to the different 
countries and services. The rationing of imports 
will not need to begin after the war. The Allies 
and neutrals are already living under a regime of 
rationing. All that will be required will be to adjust 
the form and scope of the organization to meet the 
needs of the post-war situation." 



A Selection from the 

CATALOGUE 

OF 

NEW AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS 

PUBLISHED BY 

MILLS & BOON, LTD. 

49 RUPERT STREET, LONDON, W.l 

(Close to Piccadilly Circus Tube Station). 

Telephone : 929 Regent. Telegrams : " Millsator Piccy, London." 

Cablegrams: "Millsator, London." 

NOTE. — The approximate published prices for the Jorthcoming books are given. 

It may be necessary to alter these be/ore publication. 

The Pacific Triangle 

By SYDNEY GREENBIE 

Author of "JAPAN, REAL AND IMAGINARY" 

Demy 8vo. 18s. net. 

The Problems of the Pacific, presented freshly, humanly, by one who, in 
his own remarkable experiences on the many shores of the Pacific Ocean, 
has had a special opportunity to understand matters which are becoming 
more and more pressing in the foreign relations of the United States, and to 
illustrate them with fresh facts, without bias of propaganda. 

The author writes with authority, is a keen observer, painstaking, and 
highly informing. 

Morning Post. — " Mr. Greenbie's suggestions unfold for us the tremendous 
sweep of the drama now being played on the mighty stage of the Pacific. Day 
by day we see t-he movements on the surface ; the^' are impressive enough, 
but they take on the majesty of thunder and the deeps when we realise the 
inner hidden national forces which are behind them." 

Daily Mail. — " The book is not the ordinary globe trotter's record of wander- 
ings but is full of vivid description and apt characterisation of things and 
peoples. Mr. Greenbie has the happy touch." 

Times. — " Sincere and outspoken." 

SECOND EDITION REVISED 

The Problem of Nervous 

By EDWIN L. ASH, 

M.D., B.S., MJl.CS. 

Demy 8vo. 1 Os. 6d. net. 

Times. — " A commonsense book on a subject which is of universal interest. 
Mr. Ash writes quite simply so that any reader can follow him." 

Prescriber. — " An exhaustive study of nervous people — old and young — 
and he describes their clinical conditions with a degree of accuracy rarely to 
be met with. His book is an exceptionally good one, and deserves to be 
carefully studied by every physician. 



Breakdown 



From MILLS & BOON'S LIST 



My Joy Ride Round the World 

By DOROTHY DIX 

With 16 Illustrations from Photographs. 
Demy 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. 

Everyone is interested in the quaint peoples of the East, their domestic 
customs, their ways of making love, etc., etc. In " My Joy Ride Round the 
World," Dorothy Di.x gives us in vivid word pictures her experiences of travel 
in some of the most unusual places of the globe. She does not deal with 
tiresome figures and wearisome descriptions, but is always fresh and con- 
tinually discovering some newthing. The result is a most fascinating and 
entertaining book. 

Motor Yachting for Women 

By FRANCES G. KNOWLES-FOSTER 

With 12 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 6s. net. 

A practical volume deahng fully with Motor Yachting from the woman's 
point of %'iew, with valuable tips and aids to this fascinating pastime. The 
book is founded upon personal knowledge, and is written for women by a 
woman of vast experience. 



A REMARKABLE BOOK 

Europe in Convalescence 

By ALFRED E. ZIMMERN 

Author of " The Greek Commonwealth," " Nationality and 
Government," etc. 

Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 

Three years have passed since the last guns were fired in the Great War. 
Four of the five Peace Treaties which were to be negotiated have been signed 
and ratified by the European belligerents, and are in process of execution, 
whilst the fifth — that with Turkey — is now but little concerned with European 
territories. The psychological consequences of war-strain, the hot fit of 
nationalism followed by a cold fit of parochiahsra and indifference, are slowly 
but surely passing away, and the economic reaction, the sudden boom followed 
as suddenly last year by precipitous depression, is entering into a chronic 
stage. With the disappearance of these ephemeral phenomena, the permanent 
changes wrought during the last seven years in the life of the Continent are 
becoming more manifest. It is, therefore, perhaps at last possible to attempt 
a general survey of Europe as she has been left by the greatest convulsion in 
her history, and to estimate, if necessarily in very summary fashion, what 
will be the main forces in her development during the protracted period of 
convalescence upon which it is to be hoped that she has entered. 



NEW GENERAL LITERATURE 



THE BOOK WITH A CLUE 

Painted Windows 

A STUDY IN RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY 

By 
"A GENTLEMAN WITH A DUSTER" 

Second Edition. Crown 8«ro. 5s. net. 

In this new volume the author of " The Mirrors of Downing Street " and 
" The Glass of Fashion " (over 100,000 copies of these books have been sold) 
reveals with unsparing truthfulness the chaos of opinion which exists in the 
modem Church, and enables the general reader to understand the highly 
interesting if not critical position now occupied by the Christian religion. This 
he does by means of twelve intimate and vivid portraits of religious leaders : — 

Bishop Gore Canon E. W. Barnes 

Dean Inge General Bramwell Booth 

Father Knox Dr. W. E. Orchard 

Dr. L. p. Jacks Bishop William Temple 

Bishop Hensley Henson Dr. W. B. Selbie 

Miss Maude Royden Archbishop Randall Davidson 

But, giving the clue to a unifying principle in his Introduction, the author 
leads up, through the portraits, to a Conclusion which shows how Christianity 
is Hkely to play a great, even a triumphant part, in a new and creative epoch 
of human evolution which, he suggests, the race is now fast approaching. 

In this Conclusion he summarises the most recent verdicts of physical science 
and psychology, shows how these verdicts vindicate the thesis of transcen- 
dental philosophy, and proves an identity of meaning between the thesis of 
transcendental philosophy and the plain teaching of Christ. It is a construc- 
tive book, a hopeful book, destroying only what cumbers the ground. 

Morning Post. — " Better than 'The Mirrors of Downing Street.' Whoever 
the ' Gentleman with a Duster ' may be, he must be a person of singular 
modesty. His ' Mirrors of Downing Street ' offered him a reputation which 
many writers might covet ; but he put by the ' glistering foil.' Now he has 
written a still better book about our rehgious leaders and again he forgoes the 
credit which is his due." 

Pall Mall Gazette. — " Will arrest widespread attention . . . has a direct 
and incisive bearing upon some of the most closely canvassed questions of 
the day." 

Manchester Guardian. — " It will be no matter for surprise if ' Painted 
Windows ' equals, or perhaps surpasses, the success made with ' The Mirrors 
Of Downing Street ' and ' The Glass of Fashion.'" 

Daily Graphic. — " Will rank, for satiric wit, for trenchant and not unfair 
criticism, and for vivid portraiture, with his ' Mirrors of Downing Street.'" 

Dally Sicetch. — "Better than either 'The Mirrors of Downing Street' or 
' The Glass of Fashion.' " 

Oe 3 



From MILLS & BOON'S LIST 



By the Author of " MENTAL Self-Help." 

Middle Age Health and Fitness 

By EDWIN L. ASH, M.D., B.S., M.R.G.S. 
Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 

Why fear Middle Age ? For the majority it should be the time of success, 
the age of fruition, the period of accomphshment. At forty a man is in the 
prime of life, whilst at fifty he is stiU weU within the season of vitality and 
splendid endeavour. For woman Middle Age brings some ill-health certainly, 
but that should only be in passing, and for her the years past forty need have 
no terrors. Girlhood and youth lack many sweet gifts brought by the Fairy 
of Middle Age ; experience brings contentment, and added powers of enjoy- 
ment. In society, in sport, as in her friendships and in her home, the woman 
of forty-five may still be a queen and yet look forward to a long and happy 
reign. 

But good looks and nerve, athletic success and social charm are certainly 
more rmd more dependent on physical fitness and mental poise as the years 
go by after forty ; health is, indeed, as essential to the enjoyment of middle 
bfe as in the more buoyant time of youth. In this little book the author holds 
out a helping hand to all who are looking anxiously at wrinkles, stray grey 
hairs, or their last record on the weighing machine ; he gives them a bright 
and hopeful message with many useful hints on how to keep up and doing in 
the " forties " and " fifties " of life. 



Switzerland in Summer 

(The Bernese Oberland) 

By WILL and CARINE CADBY 

With 32 Illustrations from Photographs. 
F'cap 8vo. 5s. net. 

This book will appeal to the many visitors to Switzerland in summer who, 
without being climbers, are quite capable of long and varied expeditions on 
foot in the mountains. It sets out to indicate briefly the places and the 
characteristics rather than the exact description of every trip, thereby giving 
the reader some idea of the natural features and surroundings of the various 
towns, villages, and mountain resorts of the Bernese Oberland that are likely 
to attract tourists. 

A chapter is devoted to the Social Life of Swiss hotels in summer, giving 
hints on prices, rooms, clothes, and details as to pension conditions in the 
country. Another chapter deals solely with the Alpine flora, telling when, 
and at what altitudes, the varied flowers are to be found. 

The Jungfrau Region, being the best Imown and grandest part of the district, 
is most amply illustrated. An enumeration of the headings of the chapters 
will give some idea of the scope of the book : — Interlaken, the Gate to the 
Mountains. Lauterbrunnen, the Village of Waterfalls. Murren, the Village 
of Views. Wengen, for Woods and Walks. The Kleine Scheidegg and the 
Jungfrau Railway. Grindelwald, the Glacier Village. The Lakes of Thun 
and Brienz. From Spiez to Adelboden, including the Nieson and Griesalp. 
Tb« Zimmenthal and Kandersteg. Alpine Flowers. Hotel Life. 



NEW GENERAL LITERATURE 



By the Author of " LETTERS TO My Grandson on the World About Him " 

LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON ON THE GLORY 

Ur LiNuLion I KUot Stephen coleridge 

Wltb a Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. 4s. net. 

" Letters to My Grandson on the World About Him " is a little book which 
quickly became popular, and received most laudatory notices. Its great 
success has convinced the Author that a further volume should be issued on 
English Prose, and in the Publishers' opinion with very happy results. In 
the interval between those letters and these, Antony has grown to be a boy 
in the sixth form of his public school. It has been the Author's desire to lead 
Antony into the most glorious company in the world, and he therefore acts 
as Pilot for a first voyage through what is to a boy an uncharted sea. 

FIRST STEPS TO BATTING 

By DONALD J. KNIGHT 

(Ensland, Surrey, and Oxford) 
With 72 Illustrations from Photographs. Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

The Author of this fascinating book needs no introduction to the public. 
His records speak for themselves, and as a styUst his name will be handed 
down to generations. The book is written in simple language, and in the 
treatment of the subject the Author has original views, and writes especicdly 
for beginners. 

FIRST STEPS TO LAWN TENNIS 

By A. E. BEAMISH 
Wltb 24 Illustrations from Photographs. Grown 8vo. 4s. net. 

This interesting book by the well-known International and Old Davis Cup 
representative is for the beginner. It will be found invaluable by the Novice, 
and by thousands of others who require tips and coaching in this delightful 
game. 

SECOND EDITION REVISED 

FIRST STEPS TO GOLF 

By G. S. BROWN 

With Special Oiapters on the value of Practising and Spoon Play by H.H. HILTON 

With 94 Photographs and 9 Diagrams. Crown 8vo. 4s. net. 

A book for the beginner. The illustrations give the positions for the strokes 
with remarkable clearness. 

FULL OF GOOD STORIES 

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF POLITICS 

By " THE UNDER-SECRETARY." 
F'cap Svo. 2s. 6d. net. 

A little book which contains laughter on every page. The Author has 
been very much behind the scenes, and has written a volume replete with 
(ood stories. 



FICTION 

Bound In Clotb. Printed on Best Quality Paper. Picture Wrappers. 

By the Author of " The Man from Nowhere," " Mr. Lyndon at Liberty," 
" The Lady from Long Acre." 

Greensea Island 

By VICTOR BRIDGES 
Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 7>. 6d. net. 

Dally Express (S. P. B. Mais). — " I constantly meet people who have lived 
to thank me for bringing to their notice the novels of Mr. Victor Bridges." 
Morning Post. — " No one can spin a better yarn." 
John 0' London's Weekly. — " A rattling good yam." 
Passing Show. — " A rollicking yam." 
Saturday Review. — " Gaily written and full of adventure." 
Dally Mall. — " An ideal story." 

Dally Express. — " Mr. Bridges is supreme at this kind of thing." 
Sphere (Clement Shorter). — " A vigorous piece of work." 
Dally News. — " A very entertaining novel." 
Irish Times. — " A very sensational novel." 
Sunday Times. — " Enthralling as any reader could devise." 
Dally Mall. — " An ideal story for hoUday reading •' 

A MAGNIFICENT SEA STORY 

Black Pawl 

By BEN AMES WILLIAMS 

Crown 8vo. 6s. net. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY r- 

Punch. — " He can write enthrallingly. Mr. Williams wins my most sincere 
admiration." 

Time and Tide. — " Mr. Williams can spin a first-rate yarn." 
Westminster Gazette. — " His love and knowledge of the sea, the sure way 
in which he sets before us the closed, cramped, personal atmosphere of Ufe, 
deserves comparison with the greater power of Mr. Conrad's genius. Mr. 
Williams is evidently in training for a championship, and we await the next 
round with interest. We might even put a little money on him." 

By the Author of " A Sultan's Slave." 

The Necklace of Tears 

By LOUISE GERARD 
Second Edition, Crown 8vo' "Zs. 6d. net. 

Aberdeen Free Press. — " Picturesque and romantic is this story of an 
Englishman who lives for an ideal." 

Nottingham Guardian. — " She has a descriptive touch whose deftness is 
approached by few writers and she senses atmosphere with that unerring 
•ureness whose qualification has been extensive and leisurely travel." 

6 



NEW FICTION 



By the Author of " The Other Gate." 

Played in a Box 

By SOPHIE COLE 

Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

Miss Sophie Cole goes from success to success. Her popularity is enormous 
and her readers are legion. Charming, original, and humorous, Miss Cole's 
new novel will be immensely popular. 



Cobweb 



By G. A. CHAMBERLAIN 

Author of "THROUGH STAINED GLASS," "THE LONG DIVORCE." 

Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

A dashing, laughing love story of a man who married a girl without loiowing 
who she was, with brilhant dialogue and many wittily wise observations 
about men and women and life. 

Times Literary Supplement. — " If there is a mystery in a story, and it 
interests you, and you do not guess it, though the factors are given, then you 
must put up your hands and admit that it is a good story. Judged by this 
test ' Cobweb ' is a good story. Mr. Chamberlain has produced something 
like the pattern on a Chinese plate — dainty, serious, harmonious. 

Westminster Gazette. — "Very pleasant. It is nice to spend an hour or two 
with someone who writes with the real finish of Mr. Chamberlain." 

CHARM AND HUMOUR 

On with the Motley 

By HYLTON CLEAVER 

Author of "THE TEMPTING THOUGHT." 

Crown 8vo. 78. 6d. net. 

The story of a romantic young man hampered in his efforts to get other 
folk to see him in the knightly guise in which he sees himself by a humorous 
manner which gains him instead a reputation which he does not want, until 
he finds himself hailed as a bom comedian. 

The tale relates how he becomes one in real earnest to make money, only 
to meet again the girl who in his boyhood had been his Lady, and who in her 
own world of make-beheve still pictures him to be a very gallant gentleman. 

Intriguing turns lead the young man a terrible existence for a short while ; 
he still strives manfully to be romantic, and yet each evening finds him in 
the comic raiment of a tramp comedian buffooning on the boards ; so a night 
comes at last when he trips hghtly on, only to find his lady looking at him in 
unutterable horror from the front row of the stalls. 

Things go from bad to worse. Still striving to the last to carry out his own 
conception of himself, he changes at top speed, and the girl seeks him in his 
dressing-room ; there he proposes in dramatic fashion, only to find when 
she has gone that he had forgotten to remove his stupid Uttle straw hat from 
the very top of his head before he did so. 

The young man is left thinldng out the most dramatic form of suicide. 
What happens ? 



From MILLS & BOON'S LIST 



The Street of a Thousand 



Delights 



A GEM OF liPIIOrhr^ By 

A BOOK ».rvilgIllO j^Y GELZER 

Second Edition. Crown 8vo. Gs. net. 

These tales of an exiled community are possessed of an especial charm for 
the reason that they he entirely outside the experience of the Western reader. 
Their scene is the street which twists its sinister length across the Chinese 
quarter of Melbourne. Here in The Gathering Place of the Most High we 
meet the protagonists of many strange dramas ; Sen Yeng, who could never 
forget the Chinese Lily and how she died ; the Manchu, Wong Ting Fu, whose 
love for his blind wife, Rosy May, brought death to a certain exile from 
Canton ; and many other actors in the comedies and tragedies which fill Jay 
Gelzer's pages. Dramas as varied as life itself, now delicate and wistful, now 
rising to a note of tragedy, they are invariably picturesque and impregnated 
with the elusive perfume of the East. 

Referee (Dagonet). — " A book that has a thrill and a joy to the last word." 

Scotsman. — " They have a Uvely interest both as well observed and skilfully 
presented sketches of queer characters." 

The Long Dim Trail 

By FORRESTINE HOOKER 
Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

On the Diamond H Ranch, with a background of mountain trails and 
desert dust, evolves a double love story in which romance, tragedy, and comedy 
are mingled. Katherine and Nell are women who make an instinctive appeal, 
not only for their feminine chpnn, but because they can ride, herd, and shoot 
a gun with the best of the men. There are exciting incidents to stir the blood ; 
the real atmosphere of ranch life ; and deligntful acquaintances in the 
inseparable cowboys Bronco, Holy, and Roarer, and Fong, the Chinese cook. 

The lure of the mesas and plains is in these pages, and the homely cowboy 
humour of " Limber " and his pals. 

A FINE VOLUME OF STORIES 

Tales of Love and Hate 

By CHARLES H. CRICHTON 

Crown 8vo. 7a. 6d. net. 

These stories are written in a remarkably clear and sparkling style, and 
are sure to attract wide attention. 

The scenes are laid in different parts of England, Spain, Morocco, and 
India, and the local colour is in each case wonderfully conveyed. 

The incidents described are generally full of excitement. " The Snakebite " 
is indeed a true prose poem. 

This new writer gives evidence of great power and literary skill. 

8 



NEW FICTION 



By the Author of " TRADITION." 



The Queen of Carmania 



By MARIE 
VAN VORST 



A Delightful Novel. Crown 8vo. 7c. 6d. net. 



THE NOVELS OF ANTHONY CARLYLE 

Few Novelists have come so rapidly to the front as ANTHONY CARLYLE, 
whose " The Hoofslide " and " Grains of Dust " are two of the most popular 
novels of recent years. The Fiction reader is always quick to recognise a new 
writer with chann, humour, and thrills. 

Mills & Boon are issuing a remarkable new long novel by this Author, entitled 

The Tavern and the Arrows 

7s. 6d. net. 

and they have no hesitation in saying that it will undoubtedly be one of the 
most popular novels of 1922. It is a great love story, exciting, fuU of humour 
and high spirits, and keeps the reader entranced to the last page. 

Mills & Boon have also ready Anthony Carlyle's 



The Gates of Hope 



A Story of remarkable Interest 
and a sure " best seller." 



3s. 6d. net. 



Make the acquaintance of ANTHONY CARLYLE AT ONCE, and you wiU 

be enthralled. 

THE ANTHONY CARLYLE NOVELS ARE :— 

THE HOOFSLIDE 2s. 6d. net. 

GRAINS OF DUST 88. 6d. net. 

THE GATES OF HOPE 3s. 6d. net. 

THE TAVERN AND THE ARROWS 7$. 6d, net. 



CHEAP POPULAR REPRINTS 

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A SPANISH VENDETTA Louise Gerard 

THE SPLENDID FAIRING Constance Holmb 

BEAUTIFUL END Constance Holme 

TREASURE UPON EARTH H. W. C. Newte 

28. net. 
THE CORAL PALACE Beatrice Grimshaw 

9 



RECENT ADDITIONS TO MILLS & BOON'S LIST 

SOMERSET NEIGHBOURS 

By ALFRED PERGIVALL 
Demy 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. 

A book about Somerset life and character, by a lover of Somerset and a 
resident of many j'ears. The author knows Somerset well, and has written a 
most entertaining book, with its flashes of wit and humour, and its undeniable 
charm. 

It is not too much to say of this book that, however unknown the author 
may now be, he is destined to no mean place among our best writers, for this 
book contains stories which are assuredly true genius. Those who can read of 
Jenny Rickman without tears, or of the Squire of the Woods without feeling 
that they have made a discovery, can have little taste for hterature. The 
author Uved and worked for over thirty years among the people he describes 
with such loving care, and, without knowing it, has drawn a portrait of a true 
shepherd of his people which, had it been done consciously bv another hand, 
might have stood beside Goldsmith's " VICAR OF WAKEFIELD " himself. 

Dally Mail. — " You will envy Mr. Percivall his Somerset Neighbours. They 
are charming people full of queer twists and kinks of character with a gift for 
rare expression." 

Dally News. — " A picture of real Somerset and true Somerset people." 

Somerset Journal. — " DeUghtful pictures of Somerset rural hfe and 
chciracter." 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN : Democrat 

By FRANK ILSLEY PARADISE 

Formerly Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, New Orleans 
With a Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 

The re-appearing of Abraham Lincoln as a living force in the affairs of the 
world, more than half a century after his death, is one of the striking 
phenomena of our time. The Lincoln, whose figure moves among us and whose 
voice we hear again, is still the wise and gentle leader of the people whom his 
contemporaries Imew. In his own land his memory is sufiused with a tender 
sentiment, as of one who had borne great burdens and passed through deep 
sorrows for love of his fellow men. But with the passing years sentiment, 
among his disciples, has assumed the form of a stem resolution to hve in his 
spirit and complete his unfinished task. 

Legends gather soon about a great name, but in actual life Lincoln Hved 
close to the earth. He was no saint, worked no miracles, and would have 
repudiated the idea of martyrdom. Most of his life was spent among common 
people and in the atmosphere of great books. His virtues were of the simple, 
human kind that grow in the common garden of neighbourUness, genial 
fellowship, and of high purpose. 

So far as is possible in limited space this book seeks to portray the man as he 
lived upon earth — a strugghng, ambitious, kindly man, caught up into the 
noblest of causes and reveahng both in heart and mind the great quahties of 
democratic leadership. 

Westminster Gazette. — " A very good picture of the great statesman." 

Daily Mail. — "' There was room for another good short book about the 
greatest American President, and Dean Paradise has admirably Med the 
vacant place." 

Scotsman. — " Should find many readers on both sides of the Atlantic." 



GENERAL LITERATURE 



The Lure of Old London sophiecole 

With 9 Illustrations from Photographs. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 

Miss Sophie Cole, who writes novels of London Life which lovers of London 
welcome, has, in this volume, given us a series of sketches of bits of old London. 
They are chosen haphazard, and characterised by the personal touch which 
should appeal to those who have an adventurous love of exploring the alleys 
and courts of the great city, its dim old churches and historic houses. " THE 
LURE OF OLD LONDON " is not of the guide book order, although it may 
serve that purpose for anyone with an afternoon to spare and the need of an 
object for an outing. 

The book is written in the form of letters, and Miss Cole puts her reflections 
on the places visited into the mouth of the " Honourable George," who writes 
to a friend the accounts of his rambles with his oddly chosen companion " Mrs. 
Darling." One day it is Chelsea they visit, another Fleet Street and the City, 
another Mayfair, The Charter House, or the Foundling Hospital. 

Sheffielii Telegraph. — " We get the true spirit of London in Miss Cole's 
pages ; she takes us below the surface, right into its quaint, grim, mysterious, 
romantic old heart." 

Dundee Courier. — " Who would not enjoy being led by Miss Sophie Cole 
through the beauty spots of Old London ? " 

Scotsman. — " The Author mounts her ' hobby horse ' with an enjoyment 
which the reader shares." 

Clarion. — " Very pleasing, very interesting, and well written." 

Nerves and the Nervous ''' ''SI!S.':iATs: 

Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 

Medical Times. — " Dr. Ash has made a lifelong study of nerve cases, and he 
has acquired the art of expressing his views in simple and readable style which 
will strongly appeal to the lay reader." 

Popular Science. — " The Author has banished long medical terms, and writes 
his book with the intention which he undoubtedly accomplishes, of helping 
those people afflicted with nerves who most need help." 

SOME SOCIAL 
REFLECTIONS 



The Glass of Fashion 

By "A GENTLEMAN WITH A DUSTER." 

Third Edition. Crown 8to. 5s. net. 

Spectator. — ... he is destined to light a match which in the future 
may be used to light a candle that will illuminate our little comer of the world. 
To hope more would be to hope too much. And yet how great, how tremendous 
a destiny we are half-prophesying for our author." 

Public Opinion. — " Few men have the vision, and the knowledge, and the 
power to write books like this. The pubUshers' lists show that, and the 
newspapers confirm it, and the pulpit proves it." 

The Mirrors of Downing Street 

By "A GENTLEMAN WITH A DUSTER." 

Seventeenth Edition. Crown Svo. 5s. net. 

Manchester Guardian. — " This nameless author who knows so much and 
writes so well. The essays contain the most important contribution to tht 
knowledge and understanding of our age." 

Spectator. — " Not only brilliantly worded, but full of intuition." 

II 



From MILLS & BOON'S LIST 



AN ABSOLUTELY ORIGINAL FAIRY TALE 

THE STREET THAT RAN AWAY 

By ELIZABETH CROLY 

With 4 Illustrations in Colour by R. J. WILLIAMS 

Crown Svo. 5s. net. 

Times. — " The street in question was stolen complete by the fairies from 
an old town which was being destroyed by the German invasion. And for 
their own purposes and the benefit of the children whom they put to live in 
it they keep on moving it about the world." 

Nottingham Guardian. — " There is not only magic ; there is humour, too ; 
some of it very quaint and spontaneous and some of it with the spice of worldly 
wisdom. Especially do we commend the narration of the rescue of ^sop, 
who had been buried aUve in a cave in an island by the animals who 
complained that he had libelled and betrayed them." 

Birmingham Post. — " Miss Betty Thornton has the queerest and most 
dehghtful adventures in Goblin Street. Gay and adventurous young folk live 
in Goblin Street, and there are people in it like the Pantomime fairy who never 
speaks except in verse. ^Esop is there too, and in one old house is a spinet of 
many memories and a repertory of charming stories. Both the street and 
the people in it are faithfully mirrored in the plates R. J. Williams provides 
to go with Miss Croly's enchanting history." 

Sunday Express (S. P. B. Mais). — " A remarkable achievement. Is Miss 
Croly going to rival Lewis Carroll ? She makes a big bid here." 

Children's Newspaper. — " its bright rippUng pages fill us with the pure 
dehght of childhood. As jolly a fairy tale as children ever had to read." 

Spectator. — " As comical and as full of the unexpected as the title suggests." 

Queen. — " Fresh in plot and full of fun." 

LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON ON 
THE WORLD ABOUT HIM 

By THE HON. STEPHEN COLERIDGE 
Second Edition. Crown Svo. 4s. net. 

Mr. Coleridge entertains a strong opinion that the study of Science should 
never displace in the education of the young the study of letters. Nevertheless, 
Mr. Coleridge believes that every child should learn from the world about him, 
first to recognise the evidences of design patently displayed everywhere in 
the order and process of nature, and, secondly, to be filled with reverence for 
the Power that ordained it ; accordingly he has written these letters explain- 
ing to his grandson the wonderful provisions that cover the earth with devices 
that not only make it habitable, but spread over it beauty on every side. 

The letters inculcate the habit of observation and of curiosity concerning 
matters of every day experience which are not often dealt with in school 
books, such as the causes of the singing of the kettle on the hob, of the blue 
colour of the sky in the daytime and of the red and gold colours of it at sun- 
set, of rain and dew, and winds, and many others of the daily experiences 
about us. But always Mr. Coleridge enforces the principle that scientific 
knowledge should never for a moment lessen oux adoration for the glories of 
nature. 

Daily Mall. — " Extraordinarily ingenious, accurate and comprehensible. 
There is a great deal in this book which might be read with advantage by 
many people much older than Antony." 

IVIorning Post. — " It is so full of good thoughts and takes such a simple and 
happy view of life and nature." 

Western IVIail. — " Should be placed in every boy's bantls." 



GENERAL LITERATURE 



Switzerland in Winter carTne^cadby 

With Twenty-four Illustrations. F'cap. 8vo. 4s. net. 

This is a new and thoroughly revised edition. The volume contains con- 
siderable new matter, and gives the fullest and probably most up-to-date 
information to be obtained. 

POPULAR EDITION. 

With the Walnuts and the Wine a^LLv 

F'cap. 8vo. With a Coloured Wrapper. 2s. 6d. net. 

Evening Standard. — " A meOow, jovial book, replete with good stories which 
will amuse even those who have no walnuts and no wine. Some excellent 
stories are told of the Services, and every parent will revel in the stories about 
children in this little symposium." 

Other People's Money By -a trustee" 

Second Edition. F'cap. Svo. 2s. 6d. net. 

Financial News. — " This little volume will be most helpful to novices in 
the business of trusteeship. It explains succinctly the intricacies of proving a 
will, the legal servitudes of office, and offers some sound advice upon the 
management of trust investments, the payment of legacies, and other matters 
likely to come within the scope of a trustee's duties." 

Mancliester Guardian. — " The author has a wide knowledge of his subject, 
and, as he writes with absolute impartiality, the reader may trust to his 
guidance. In language entirely free from difficult technicalities, he points 
out what they must do and what they must avoid in the various stages of the 
trust, in order to conserve the assets, avoid litigation, and in the end have a 
satisfactory winding up." 

Financial Times. — " The chapters on investments, on proving a will, on 
distinctions between capital and income, on the payment of annuities, on 
legacies to minors, on choosing executors and trustees, on the PubUc Trustee, 
and on other corporate trustees, will be found particularly helpful and often 
illuminating." 



A STUDY IN THE 

ECONOMICS OF 

MIND POWER 



Common Sense Self-Help 

By EDMUND DANE, LL.B. 
F'cap. Svo. 2s. 6d. net. 

What is the secret of the clear and strong common sense which inspire* 
confidence in the judgments of those who have it ? That is the question which 
the author has set himself to investigate and answer, and he has revealed the 
mystery. The modem principles of Psychology, stripped of technicaUty and 
difficulty, are lucidly summarised, and the part played by Feehng, Imagination, 
and Will in the working of the mind as an efficient machine set out as well as 
the part played by the Reasoning Faculty. It is shown that Logic, or the Art 
of Reasoning, is properly an application of Psychology as the Science of Mind 
Power. The uses of the Art of Reasoning in Inductive and Deductive Infer- 
ence and in the formation of correct judgments are dealt with practically. 
A valuable feature is the chapter on how to avoid and detect fallacies. It 
contains a large amount of scientific marrow in a small compass; it is the 
science of Mind Power put in a nutshell. 

Financiai News. — " A concise yet illuminating essay ... a stimulating 
and suggestive aid to practical affairs." 

13 



From MILLS & BOON'S LIST 



TAKE IT IN TIME '"■"' ^.izr.^ 

By the Author of " HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE." 

F'cap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. 

In this Uttle book the truths of Thrift and Economics are set out in simple 

and idiomatic Enghsh, freed from difficulty and plainly and clearly stated 

The author shows how character makes money and how a true view of the 

world and its affairs, formed early in Ufe, is the secret of thnving and succesi. 

The aim is to give bovs and girls a grasp of practical and working truths and 

facts which all should, for their own happiness and well-being, know It 

covers ground not hitherto taken up in education, and, ahke m subject and 

style is admirably adapted as a reading book. From cover to cover the book 

is packed with facts tersely put and in a way that makes it insisten ly interest- 

nr The author has laid himself out to put lucidly the lessons of he and the 

refults of experience, so that youthful readers may avoid pitfalls. What 

money is and does and what is meant by industry and commerce are shown 

in language the youngest minds can readily understand. 



THE HISTORY AND ADVENTURES 

nC A DflMMV By EDMUND DANE, LL.B. 

Ur A rLllll 1 F'cap. 8vo. 2s.6d.net. 

This Uttle book sets out some of the leading and elementary truths of 
economics and more especially those relating to wages, prices production 
l^dSa'nge It touches upon and iUustrates the true association between 
SpiS and Labour in the creation of wealth, and shows the part played by 
sdence invention, and skill. The author's thesis in effect is that to P^mote 
TDOPuUr knowledge of economic truth is the surest means of promoting 
DopXr thrift which, based upon a popular knowledge of economic truth « 
the^surest safeguard against faJitastic politics. The means of creating wealth 
Sid common Ibundance were never greater than they axe to-day _ 

THE BETRAYAL OF LABOUR 

AN OPEN LETTER TO RIGHT HON. J. R. GLYNES, M.P. 

By the Author of "The Mirrors of Downing Street." 

Crown 8vo. ls.net. 
Aberdeen Dally Journal.—" A characteristically shrewd and pungent work " 
South Wales Argus.—" He is inspired by a genmne_ desire to see a better 
world. His sympathy with the masses is self-evident. 

MY IMPRESSIONS OF WALES 

By ALFRED E. ZIMMERN 

Author of " The Greek Commonweahh," " Nationality and Gov«mnMOt." 

Crown 8vo. Sjcond Edition. Is. net. 

A brilhant and incisive, but studiously unbiassed, sketch by a recognised 
authority on modem Wales and its problems and ot the relations between 
Welsh and Enghsh, which should be of particular interest at the present 
juncture 

X4 9 












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